Denzil's Stories

Mixtapes — The Seventies Denzil Jayasinghe 6 min read·May 27, 2021 8 1 My first exposure to music was from listening to a Telefunken, my family’s only radio with buttons and dials. A perfect German-made beast that sat in the middle of our family living room. It operated on batteries before my neighbourhood was connected to the electricity grid. There was only one broadcaster in Sri Lanka, the state-owned broadcasting authority. Channels were few. AM and Short Wave were the frequencies used. There were no FM or digital radio channels then. My father listened to the news on the radio regularly. The rest of the time, we listened to music from it. I did not listen to Sri Lankan music much. I liked Hindi music from Bollywood movies which were beamed to Sri Lanka from India. In between, I listened to English music. One could pick short wave signals from BBC on a good day, with some disturbance. That was good enough for me. I was more of a fan of contemporary English pop music from the early ...

Mabima Seeya (මාබිම සීයා) S eeya means grandfather in Sri Lanka. Mabima Seeya was my mother’s uncle, elder and only brother to my grandmother. My paternal grandfather died when my father was fifteen. My maternal grandfather died when I was six. So I had no grandfathers to grow up with — it was one and only Mabima Seeya. Mabima Seeya had introduced my father to my mother, so I was a by-product of his  doing . He saw me as his grandson, his making. He had no grandsons of his own at the time. So I was also the first grandson in the extended family on my mother’s side. Mabima Seeya did not fail to show his affection for me when he regularly visited our family, at least once a month. Don Caithan Martin was Mabima Seeya’s name. He was tall, slim, and dark, but he was a towering figure. He wore white drill suits and smoked cigars. He spoke with authority, holding his cigar in his fingers. He could speak good English, a rarity at the time. He lived with his family in the ancestral hom...

Apprentice @ OTS — Part I Denzil Jayasinghe 8 min read · Apr 24, 2021 On 2nd May 1973, I started my first job as an apprentice in Overseas Telecommunication, Service (OTS), Colombo, Sri Lanka. The job title was “Trainee, Overseas Telegraphist’. It was a fancy title for an eighteen-year-old with very few strands of facial hair. There were twenty-five apprentices in all. They were all male, in a period without notion of STEM. The training school was on the 6th floor of the OTS building, located on Duke Street, in the heart of the Central Business District, Colombo. It was one of the few modern multi-story buildings in Sri Lanka at a time when tall buildings were a rarity. My batch mates came from all regions of the country with diverse ethnic identities, speaking many languages with distinctly regional accents. Talking to them was an experience of diversity on the tiny island of Sri Lanka. The instructor was Shirley De Silva, a male in his mid-forties with twenty-odd years of experience ...