Book Review: The Cake That Was Baked at Home: Lakshman Kadirgamar by Ajita Kadirgamar – By Wimal Kannangara
Source : Dæhæna – February 2025
Image Source : vijithayapa.com
Written to commemorate the 10th death anniversary of Lakshman Kadirgamar, “The Cake That Was Baked at Home” is a rare, sometimes intimate and emotional collection of personal notes, extractions from published articles and notes from interviews on the very complex person, Lakshman Kadirgamar, easily the most illustrious Foreign Minister Sri Lanka had. The image of Kadirgamar that is presented is supported by a large number of citations.
The book’s title comes from his speech at the Oxford Union on March 18, 2015, at the unveiling of his portrait, just a few months before his death. “I would like to, if I may, assume that I could share the honour with the people of my country, Sri Lanka. I had my schooling there, I went to Law College there and by the time I came to Oxford as a postgraduate student, well, I was relatively a mature person. Oxford was the icing on the cake… but the cake was baked at home…”
Ajita chronicles his privileged upbringing in a family that moved from Jaffna to Colombo with his lawyer father intermingled with family tragedies. Lakshman’s mother passed away when he was seven. It is said that the impact of that tragedy never left him. He was very fond of his older and only sister Iswari whom he called Akka, for she had become his surrogate mother. It was the sister’s move to Matale that prompted him to choose Trinity College, Kandy as his school “to be close to home”.
The book goes on to describe his time at Trinity College where he excelled both in academia and sports, his time at the brandnew Peradeniya University, his move to Oxford where he became the President of the Oxford Union, his time at the United Nations (UN) International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) where he advised several countries on intellectual property matters and also his return to Sri Lanka in late 80s to start a thriving law practice.
A completely new chapter of his life begins with his foray into politics in 1994. No doubt it has left quite a
negative mark on the author. The person whom Ajita remembered as a loving and caring person changed
completely aloof and inaccessible to the family. Whether it was due to the pressures of work, security considerations or for some other reason is not clear.
However, this does not diminish Lakshman’s transformation of the Foreign Ministry of Sri Lanka. He began by recruiting the most promising young professionals into the service, training them well, and promoting them into responsible positions. The author reinforces these assertions with interviews from the people he worked with in the Foreign Service of Sri Lanka.
Easily the best Finance Minister by a wide margin, how he conducted himself as a Sri Lankan and promoted the interests of Sri Lanka is praiseworthy beyond words. The book describes the key milestones of his career well. His last official act before he was gunned down was to preside over the ceremony to mark the release of the publication “International Relations in a Globalising World (IRGW).
The tributes by many eminent personalities on the 10th anniversary of his death confirm the person he was and the contributions he made to humanity.
Wimal Kannangara
