Dr Ariyasena Jayasekera (A J) Gunawardena, an outstanding university teacher, writer/journalist, cinema personality and art critic. When he failed to regain consciousness from open heart surgery, at the relatively young age of 65, we lost a rare intellectual who had his feet firmly on the ground, and constantly built bridges linking media, culture and society.

AJ's academic and professional accomplishments are well known and remembered. Having started as a journalist with Daily News, where he was a noted arts and culture correspondent in the 1960s, he went on to obtain a doctorate in performing arts from New York University. Upon return, he pursued a career in academia as a professor of English at the Vidyodaya University (later University of Sri Jayawardenapura) and was closely associated with film and media education. He chaired a Presidential Committee of Inquiry on the Sri Lankan film industry, which issued its report in 1985. In the arts world, he is perhaps best remembered for the screenplays he wrote for three films by Lester James Peries: Baddegama (1980), Kaliyugaya (1982) and Yuganthaya (1985). At the time of his death in September 1998, AJ was working on a biography of the doyen of the Sri Lankan cinema, which was posthumously published in 2005.

AJ's contributions as opinion writer and columnist have not been as widely acknowledged. AJ was a rare public intellectual who - in his writing and public speaking - stood for a united and multicultural Sri Lankan society. In doing so, he stood apart from many fellow members in the academia and media, his twin fraternities, whose parochialism and misplaced nationalism have propelled us into the current depths of despair. As Arthur C. Clarke, a long time friend and associate of AJ, remarked in a poignant tribute: "AJ's sudden death is a setback in our collective struggles against fanaticism and fundamentalism."

Moderates are hard to find in any society even in peacetime, and especially rare and endangered in times of conflict. AJ was one such man, but at the same time, he held firm opinions and had the courage of his conviction to express them. He articulated his (often dissenting) views brilliantly, which made him one of the finest commentary writers in our English language press, where he wrote a regular media and culture column for over a decade in the 1980s and 1990s.

AJ was highly multi-disciplinary, had wonderful sense of humor and was totally devoid of pomposity. At a time when artistes and intellectuals assume extremist positions to draw cheap popularity or build larger-than-life images, AJ never used his media platform to oversell a personal agenda. He belonged to that diminishing tribe that still assigns more importance to the song than the singer; hence his use of the pseudonym Jayadeva.

See photos of celebrities before they hit the big-time.

A.J. Gunawardena

Writer