Don Baldwin Kuruppu was a straight forward man who expressed his views in a candid manner and expected others also to do the same. He was a sincere friend and always out to help others.
Baldwin (as he was known to his friends) was born in Uduwa, in the Horana area. After his school and university careers he served as a teacher in Ananda College in Colombo. He was a very respected teacher who went out of his way to help his students to excel in their studies and guided them even in their later careers.
I got to know Baldwin when he was the Personnel Manager of the Ceylon Cement Corporation. Later he joined as a Trainer/Consultant at the National Institute of Business Management (NIBM). He contributed to the training at NIBM and initiated a number of effective training courses like the programme on ‘Transactional Analysis’, the contents of which, he published as a book.
He was instrumental in the introduction of employee participation programmes in most of the public enterprises during the seventies of the last century. His leadership in this activity made him serve in the Ministry of Industries on a part time basis and advise the corporations supervised by that Ministry to make the best uses of participative management approaches to enhance their contribution to the national economy.
Baldwin was a prolific writer. One of his first publications was the Sinhala translation of ‘Don Quixote’ (Travels of Baron Von Manchusen) as ‘Manchusen Charika’ that is very popular among the school children due to the very appropriate spoken Sinhala he has used to relate the humorous episodes in the story. He migrated with his family to Melbourne, Australia and continued his literary activities there too. He was a live wire in the Sri Lankan community in Melbourne. He has written and published quite a number of novels about the foibles of our migrants down under in a sarcastic manner. Yet they have been widely read there as well as in Sri Lanka. His grasp of the Sinhala and English languages helped him to produce literary pieces for the local newspapers (when he was in Sri Lanka) based on incidents of current interest that were greatly appreciated by the reading public. He was also a popular speaker, orator and a career counselor.
While in Sri Lanka his reviews on literary works and dramas were a frequent feature in the national press.
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