Stanley William and Elmo William :
A tribute to pioneers in aluminium extrusions industry in Sri Lanka
At a time when Alumex aluminium extruded products have become a household name in the building industry in the country, it is only proper that we pay a tribute to the two pioneers who introduced aluminium extrusions as a local industry to Sri Lanka.
In the early 1980s a Korean businessman, K Y Choi visited Sri Lanka in search of a partner for a joint venture to set up an aluminium extrusion plant. He was introduced to me by a colleague, who functioned as General Manager, People’s Merchant Bank, then, and I introduced him to my Managing Director, Elmo William of Ceyloyd International Ltd. Elmo studied the project positively and persuaded his brother Stanley William to consider the project of Choi. Elmo William promptly carried out the necessary feasibility studies in collaboration with the People’s Merchant Bank, and got the approval of parent company, United Ceylon Insurance Co., Ltd., to begin a joint venture for the manufacture of aluminium extrusions. The financing was undertaken by DFCC Bank and the Bank of Ceylon.
At that time, the construction industry was dominated by timber for the fabrication of doors and windows. However, the dearth of timber was acutely felt and environmentalists had issued a warning on the threat to the dwindling forest reserves.
The import of timber was not possiblet due to the cost. Hence, the need for a substitute was greatly felt. The joint venture mooted by the William brothers by the name of Alumex [Pvt] Ltd took up the challenge to offer an alternative product for timber. The sudden demise of Elmo William in the latter part of the 1980s dealt a severe blow to the expansion of the new company. Thereafter his brother, Stanley William gave leadership with his wide experience in the business arena.
The new company had to face serious challenges due to the reluctance of the market to accept aluminium extrusions in place of timber. Aluminium was expensive compared to timber and also there was a shortage of aluminium technicians for the fabrication of doors and windows.
The Sri Lankan culture too did not favour aluminium as against timber. In view of these problems the company faced serious financial crisis due to non- payment of bank loans, etc. When the company was on the verge of collapse, Stanley William with his far sighted business acumen and exercising stringent controls over finances, was able to tide over the stormy waters and take the company to safer grounds. In that exercise the assistance, guidance and cooperation extended by the DFCC Bank and Bank of Ceylon has to be appreciated.
At the dawn of the new millennium Alumex emerged as a market leader in aluminium extruded products. As the Finance Director then, I persuaded Stanly William to set up a subsidiary company with a new plant, to cater to the market with a variety of new profiles.
Accordingly, the second plant was commissioned with new machinery and the production capacity doubled. It was struck another blow with the sudden demise of Stanley William in 2001. The period that followed was turbulent, with ups and downs. However, the Board of Management was able to tide over the difficulties and emerge successful as a vibrant entity.
It is most gratifying to note that Alumex [Pvt] Ltd, incorporated with the initiative of the late Stanley and Elmo William has become a premier producer of aluminium extrusions in Sri Lanka, today. The company which has rendered an invaluable service to the building industry will stand tall as a great achievement of the late Stanley and Elmo William. They are not among us to see Alumex which has climbed the ladder to become the market leader in the industry today. Similarly they are not here to see the ownership of the company being eclipsed from the William family, into the hands of an industrial giant in the country.
At this time of the year when the nation is getting ready to celebrate the biggest cultural event, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, my memory goes back to that eventful morning of April 7, 2001. On that day, Stanley William who had visited Kandy to pay homage to the Sri Dalada Maligawa had collapsed on the footsteps on his way to the shrine room and passed away immediately. We lost a Buddhist leader, a philanthropist, leading businessman and above all a gentleman par excellence.
The nation owes a debt of gratitude to these two gentlemen, Stanley and Elmo William for the unforgettable services rendered by them to the local aluminium extrusions industry.
May they attain the supreme bliss of Nibbana
H M Weerasuriya
Prof. Valentine Joseph:
Exponent of relativity
Prof. Valentine Joseph left us on March 15, 2017.I last met Prof. Joseph at his home in 2001. To my enquiry about his well being, he replied, “growing very old, gracefully, I hope”. Gracefulness, indeed, is his hallmark that readily comes to mind whenever I remember, with gratitude, this great teacher and humanist.
It was in the year that I entered the University of Colombo as an undergraduate, that Prof. Joseph retired from its mathematics department. I vividly remember him taking a miniature ceremonial oil lamp and a small bottle of oil from his worn-out black leather briefcase and lighting it up to signify wisdom, which he hoped would illuminate those present in a small lecture room that day. The specifics of what he said on that occasion of his retirement have faded away from my memory; he certainly talked about Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, which he reflected on deeply throughout his life. What remains with me is the awe I felt about the depth of knowledge he possessed and the continuing struggle to understand the deep mysteries of the universe, while not abandoning humanity in that endeavour. Science and its practitioners tend to be perceived – sometimes with justification – as cold and void of empathy. The wholeness in the being that Prof. Joseph strove toward in his life may be best captured in the German word ‘Dasein’ that was the focus of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.
In a world where the individual is inseparable from titles and labels they wear, Prof. Valentine Joseph, though technically an applied mathematician and a theoretical physicist identified himself most humbly as a teacher. This again emanates from his attempt to carve out a consistent path, which blended both science and humanism seamlessly at his core. True to his being as a teacher, on a request from several of us fourth-year students, keen to learn relativity theory from him, Prof. Joseph came out of retirement to teach that course, just for a few. There is a story that he once gave ten rupees to a beggar, an unheard of amount to be given to a beggar at that time in Sri Lanka. Moreover, it was all the money he had, at that moment. When asked about the gesture he said, “how can one say no to someone in need?” I believe he did the same for us, the begging students, to come out of retirement to teach relativity!
The special relativity course that Prof. Joseph taught us was not relativity in the traditional sense. The emphasis was not on the Michelson-Morley experiment (important as it is) or on the paradoxes of clocks running slow and of the shrinking meter sticks. The emphasis was on the space-time geometry, its symmetries, and the invariants, out of which the common results just blossomed. Looking back, it seems, that in spirit, his course in relativity was presented to us as a leisurely walk in the garden of Einstein and Minkowski, so that each one may pick a bouquet to his or her liking. Needless to say, as first-timers encountering relativity, the walk in the garden was no walk in the park. Here, again, Prof. Joseph’s humanism shone. He was keenly aware, both, from an intellectual as well as a social standpoint, the challenges students faced in learning the complex and subtle concepts in relativity. He approached the problem of some of the students having to support their families through working part time or having to allocate time for certification courses aimed at employment, with ingenuity and empathy.
Those students who weren’t so interested in learning relativity would still be able to pass the course minimally by demonstrating some basic understanding, but to obtain higher grades would require greater dedication and understanding, both conceptual and computational, and there were specific ways in which students’ efforts and understanding correlated with their grades.He used to say, the man on the street does not have to care about relativity but only about the rice and the dhal. His approach helped both, the serious students and those whose primary interests were not in the advanced-sciences.
Prof. Joseph had a deep understanding and appreciation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, both, in its special and general relativistic forms. He was able to internalize the relativity theory himself in all its technical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives and we were indeed fortunate to learn relativity from such an eminent scholar.
A recurring theme that emerged during my conversations with Prof. Joseph, both in and out of the classroom, was how physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, and especially, Einstein, were able to glimpse a reality beyond our immediate senses. Once at a discussion on a counter intuitive result from relativity, he moved his palm under his nose and said, “look for the reality under your nose”. In this way he wanted to make us feel at home with the difficult non-intuitive phenomena like the reality of space-time revelation.
In a lecture in December 1996, titled, “Understanding Relativity in its Cultural Context” he said, “Man is searching for ultimate reality by revising, from time to time, his understanding of the external world, which is represented by the mathematical concepts”. He likened the leap made from the physics of Galileo, Newton, Lagrange, and Hamilton to the physics of Maxwell, Einstein, Minkowski, Schrodinger, and Heisenberg to the efforts of Arahants (Those who freed themselves of all worldly fetters) who crossed the river of perception and of senses to arrive at the shores of greater reality. The following passage from his lecture is particularly apt for the current polarized world in turmoil:
“The theory of relativity is a turning point in the history of mankind, largely because it raises serious questions about human perception of the world, especially, the very language we employ to describe our experience.“Human society will stand or fall depending on the coherence of this perception among its members. Tragically, there exists today, an abyss between scientists and laymen, between science and technology.
Bertolt Brecht has portrayed this crisis in his famous play “Life of Galileo”. The only way of bridging this abysmal gap is by means of an education which incorporates not only skills but also values the burden of which lies squarely on the shoulders of the teachers”.
He once shared a movie (in the now long-gone VHS format, of course) with us students to take home and watch, if we so desired. The movie was I.Q. starring Walter Matthau, Meg Ryan, and Tim Robbins, where Einstein (Matthau), with his brilliance, helps in some matchmaking!
When asked what “time” it is, he is said to have answered “it’s time for lunch!”. I met Prof. Joseph from time to time at his home. He would walk to the Borella junction to get some short-eats beforehand if he knew that I was coming.
I immensely cherished the hours I spent at his home discussing physics, philosophy, and about the physicists – their struggles, their intellectual courage, and also about their follies and foibles. These discussions left an indelible stamp in me in ways that are not possible to describe. I can still picture him at his desk in his study, writing in his meticulous handwriting, with a painting of Jesus hanging above his head, which read, “I am counting on you”. He was pulled out from retirement, on short notice, once again, when the famed mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah visited the Colombo campus.
In a letter I received in the year 1999, he remarked that the little angel in the Christmas card I sent him reminded him of the heavenly peace. I close this in his memory with his own words:
“What is it that I experience with my senses?
What is it that I abstract with my mind?
We hope a new vision will dawn on us in the course of time.
Happy journey on life’s way!”
Rasil Warnakulasooriya
Massachusetts, USA