Savindu and Pasindu Herath: Reflections on brotherhood

Savindu and Pasindu Herath have been to the same school, indulged in the same sports and clubs and societies (well, almost), passed out with flying colours in the same subjects and streams, and entered the same University, resuming the same activities they’d done and encountered in their younger days. What they’ve done interests me less for their associations with various tournaments than for the fact that they (and this is something I noticed when I interviewed them) are so casual about what they’ve done. The fact that they can’t really be categorised the way I’ve categorised each and every person I’ve interviewed for this magazine speaks volumes about what they’ve triumphed in. Here’s their story.

Naturally enough, we have to start with the elder brother. That’s Savindu. Savindu’s parents and uncles and cousins had engaged in a variety of sports in their day – rugby, cricket, cadetting – and this, he tells me, had naturally enough led them to expect him to resort to and balance out both sports and academics during his student years. His father and mother were both engaged in finance and management, the father as a Director of Finance and his mother as an Auditor. Having entered Ananda College, Savindu hence lost no time in getting involved in extra-curricular activities. To find out which among them he could get used to the easiest, however, he had to wade through swimming in Grade One and gymnastics and chess as the years progressed. It was in Grade Four that he found what he’d hankered after. Hockey.

Why did he take to hockey? “Because I had endurance, I could run quickly, and I felt that the game was meant for me.” That conviction stayed with him for a long, long time, long after some tepid and harrowing first encounters with President’s College, Asoka Vidyalaya, and St Joseph’s College that saw his team being defeated. By this time he had, of course, let go of gymnastics and swimming, though in later years he got involved with power lifting (which culminated in the South Asian Junior Games held in Bangalore, India). He did not, fortunately, let go of chess: while he did not win age category matches as such, during his A Level years he got to be the Vice Captain of the College team, ending up as the fourth best national school team in 2011. He had waited until Grade Eight, however, to get selected to that school team.

Savindu also became Head Prefect, yet another responsibility he had to put up with while concentrating on probably the most difficult subject stream anyone could offer for his or her A Levels (in 2012), Physical Science. But he got through, not by passing but by obtaining A’s for all the subjects he had selected (Maths, Physics, and Chemistry). The results had been enough (he had incidentally been the Head Prefect to secure the highest marks in the stream he had chosen in the history of his school) to secure a placement at the University of Moratuwa for Mathematics, where, reflecting his career at school, he got involved in hockey. “I had to choose one sport, and it was basically a struggle of sorts between chess and hockey. In the end I opted for the latter.” For obvious reasons, hockey at University was different to hockey at school, since team members graduate and leave every other year. He then captained the team at Moratuwa, clinching victory at the Mora Sevens and the Kelaniya Nines and becoming runners up at the Inter University Tournament, organised by the Sri Lanka University Sports Association, last year. At school he had been the Left Insider, while at University he became the Right Insider.

That’s Savindu. In a nutshell. What about the younger brother? Pasindu too had got involved with hockey, inspired no doubt by the elder, though at an earlier age: while Savindu had to wait until Grade Four to discover his passion for the game, Pasindu discovered it quite easily in Grade Two. “I got to be the first Captain of the first ever Under Nine Hockey team inaugurated at my school,” he told me, adding rather wistfully that the category has since been abolished. Hockey had obviously been the first choice, but it had also been (for him, that is) the only option. It was in 2004 that he became the Under Nine Captain. Things moved quickly thereafter: the first match he encountered had been with and against S. Thomas’, and the team, he remembers, weren’t equipped enough: consequently, they had lost by a wide margin, 5-0. That first defeat, however, had not discouraged him, and it in fact emboldened him to push harder and wade on.

The result? “We ended up as the Second Runners Up at the Sri Lanka Schools Hockey Championship in 2004, the same year I became a hockey player at Ananda.” From then on he had secured the captaincy for the Under 11 (2005) and the vice-captaincy for the Under 13 (2006) teams. His preferred hockey icon, incidentally, had been Jamie Lundmark, who had also in a way inspired Savindu. “Jamie taught us that being tall and stout wasn’t an automatic qualification for this game. He taught us that what mattered was pushing your stamina to its limits.” There was another point: Jamie was a centre fielder, the same position occupied during his school years.

This was in turn followed by a series of veritable wins and mild defeats as the years went by: in 2010, for instance, he captained the Western Province team that went to Malaysia, but they could not (“because, to be honest, we weren’t good enough”) break into the quarter finals, while a more promising encounter aboard the Under 21 Sri Lanka Schools Championship (the Junior National Hockey Tournament) had seen them break into the quarter finals, though they were defeated by a team from Kandy. That latter encounter, by the way, had been Pasindu’s first real achievement in the game. Eventually, they managed to become the Runners Up in 2012 at the Under 17 National Championship.

But then it wasn’t only hockey which moved him. This is where I get to his involvement with chess and an activity that he remembers with deep nostalgia, police cadetting.

First, chess. Having started out in Grade Two (“I discovered that the queen, for some reason, was my favourite piece”) he nevertheless had to wait until Grade Five to be taken into the College Team. That year, he became the fifth in an age category match nationally, which had spurred him to try harder and end up representing Sri Lanka at the 3rd Asian Schools Chess Festival, held in Sri Lanka. He became the 11th in Asia there. For some reason, though, he had to give up the game in Grade Seven, which meant that he had to divert his attention and energy to the other activity he got involved with, police cadetting. That had come right after yet another Club he joined at Ananda, which had only recently been started back then: mountain running, a mishmash of athletics and mountaineering which saw his team win the top national slot in both 2014 and 2015. That feat, over two consecutive years, was adequate for him to win colours.

He began police cadetting in 2012. Like mountain running, this was an activity that his brother had not been involved with. It had in fact been a coincidence which got him into the cadet team: a much needed member had become absent owing to exams, and they needed a replacement. That replacement was Pasindu. As with every other club, society, and sport he had got entangled in, this too had fascinated him, enough for him to (what else?) push himself into trying harder and winning big. The end-result was worth it: from a Cadet member to Lance Corporal to Corporal to Sergeant and finally to Company Rank, Pasindu had led the team to several victories at the Rantembe Camp, where the team as a whole had to undergo a set of written and performance-based examinations. “We missed the top slot by just four marks in 2012. Four years later, when I volunteered to be the Sergeant owing to the fact that the person who was the Sergeant had to obtain study leave for his A Levels, we triumphed with eight trophies and secured that top slot.”

All these had been supplemented by intermittent trysts with English debating, English drama, and the Model United Nations (“I started out as an administrative staff member, and then graduated to be a delegate of Lebanon and the Congo”). They had in turn been supplemented by his being appointed as the Head Prefect for the period 2016/2017, though these had not got in the way of his studies too much. With enough results (again, in Physical Science) to get a placement at the University of Moratuwa, Pasindu would no doubt have followed his brother’s footsteps for his higher education, when, on the day before I interviewed him and Savindu, he received news that he had been selected for the MEXT scholarship to study in Japan. The package was enticing: 120,000 yen a month, plus medical insurance and tickets to Japan. “I spent two weeks at Moratuwa. For the scholarship, I decided to offer Mechanical Engineering.”

Everything I’ve written here speaks for itself, I should think. In what these two brothers have done, have engaged in, have from the sidelines partaken of, and have decided to do for their future. Their story hasn’t ended. Obviously. It has only just begun.

Written for: The Island YOUth, January 21 2018