Dr Daya Rodrigo, Senior Surgeon, NHSL, Colombo, Sri Lanka.

 

Dr. Daya Rodrigo, Senior Surgeon. NHSL

Remembering Daya Rodrigo

Dr. Daya Rodrigo was senior to me at the Medical Faculty, Kynsey Road, Colombo. He was married to my batch mate of 1960 entrants, Dr. Nalini Ratnayake. I came into close contact with Daya when we were Consultant Surgeon colleagues, at the General Hospital – GH Colombo, later renamed the National Hospital of Sri Lanka – NHSL, from 1991 to 2000.

Daya would be in the Consultants lounge at the NHSL, regularly at around 12pm. Most of the time, he would be waiting for his better half Nalini, to turn up. They were very close, this couple. I have never seen this couple having confrontations. If there was any differences opinion on any matter, it was always discussed with soft voices and smiles.

From 1991 to the year 2000 I would come for my lunch break to see Daya seated in the Consultants Lounge. The topics we discussed ranged from computers, cars, general state of our country etc.

Daya and myself started our introduction to computers using the Sinclair ZX 81 and the Spectrum.  The Sinclair ZX 81 had only one KB storage space.  The computer had its memory storage in an audio cassette. The audio player was connected to the ZX. The monitor we used was the home TV. We programmed the computer using BASIC as the language of the computer.

 ZX had to be connected to the TV input to play a game of chess, we bought the package to run chess stored in a ‘floppy disc’. The loading of the programme to the ZX81 took a long time. We would start the loading process and maybe take a shower and come back to see, that the computer had just finished loading the programme.

In the early 1990s there were other micro computers in the market. There was the top of the list the BBC micro, and there was the Atari.

We had some programmes entered in BASIC and running. Daya introduced the use of the microcomputers in analysis of data to the Post-Graduate Institute of Medicine, Colombo.

We were using the CDs to listen to music and watch films on our TVs. There were games, films and various programmes ‘written’ on the CDs. The computers at home that we were using did not have the ability to write data on CDs.

One day Daya took me to see the computer room in the Medical Faculty Library. It had a computer to read and write data to the writeable CD. They had CDs from Medline bought every month updating publication on ‘Medline’. This was quite amazing to us. Before long we bought our own right able CDs.

The Windows programmes made their appearance. Mr. Ariyathilake who was a patient of Daya, was our computer expert dealing with hardware and software. We did regular upgrades with him.

Daya was also was interested in Photography. We used film cameras till the early part of the twenty first Century. Then came the Digital cameras and we progressed in photography using only digital cameras.

Daya was very interested in wild life photography. Daya and Nalini made regular trips to our National Parks. Once he had relocated a Python from outside the park to release it inside the park premises. He had taken the Python and used his car to transport it.

Daya had a fund of stories to relate and it was a pleasure to listen to them.

In the last conversation I had with Daya he asked me about the photos I took,  in my newly acquired ‘GoPro 9’ camera that I had recently acquired. I told him that it had a tough learning curve, but that I was progressing.

The first news we got of  Daya’s demise was from Sujiva and Buddy via email. It came as a real shock, because Daya was active and Nalini and Daya had done a trip to one of our National Parks and were planning on a trip to Australia, to stay with his daughter for a few months.

I tried to get Nalini to give her our condolences on the phone.

Nalini being close to him all these years would miss him and a loss of this magnitude would be very hard to bear. But she is sure to come out of her sorrow and we would like to see her in her earlier active self.

I picked two poems for Nalini to read and reminisce.

 Nalini, ‘ May the Good Lord Bless and Keep you…’

Philip and Ramya.