Sporting Star is part of my own family history, but most of that history was never properly published. I know what gets lost when everybody assumes somebody else will remember it. I don’t want the same thing to happen to Herbert Cooray, Hiran Cooray and Jetwing.
You were also thinking about sustainability before Sri Lanka really had that word. In the early 1990s, you pushed Jetwing to treat hotel wastewater instead of simply sending it into the sea. Your own executives reportedly questioned why the company should spend money doing it. You did it anyway. Years later, everybody calls that sustainability.
Today Jetwing says it has more than 35 hotels and villas. You became the first Sri Lankan Chairman of PATA, served on the board of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, worked with the UNWTO Tourism Ethics Committee, and repeatedly represented Sri Lankan tourism internationally.
But I do not think your book should be a catalogue of titles, awards and photographs.
I think the real book is one question:
How do you spend your life selling a country to the world when that country repeatedly makes itself difficult to sell?
You have spent decades arguing that Sri Lanka should compete on quality rather than quantity, bring in visitors who actually spend, brand the country properly, protect what visitors come here to see and make tourism benefit communities rather than destroying them.
That is the book.
My working title is: