MAS Holding | Nanda Wanninayaka

Dian Gomes – Photo Courtesy – BUSINESS TODAY

I had the great pleasure of meeting with Dian Gomes, the Chairman of Hela Clothing (an apparel manufacturing company,) in his Colombo office a few days ago. He was my superior at MAS Holding (Slimline subsidiary) between the years 2001 – 2002. (Well, he was my superior, but he was also a friend, a mentor and a brother to me, rather than a ‘boss’ throughout my acquaintance with him over the years).

Even though my employment with MAS was short-lived, during which time I learnt valuable lessons from this amazing motivator of aspiring employees (and “a ruthless executioner” when it comes to shoddy employees.)

I left the comfortable, pensionable government employment as a teacher of English in my village school because I was frustrated and disappointed with the lethargic system in government service and joined MAS in the year 2000 to improve, advance and develop myself so that I could contribute my two cents to the world to which I felt I was indebted for making me who and what I was.

I observed and learnt much at MAS from Dian. Due to that I was able to bring Horizon Lanka Foundation to what it is today. This was mainly due to what I learnt and observed mainly from Dian, relating to marketing and management strategy. I am a village farmer’s son and do not have the luxury of possessing an MBA from Harvard Business School nor any degree from a local university either for that matter!

I hope Dian would be there to guide me further to make Horizon Lanka a global brand in dynamic education strategies and innovative teaching methods, (in Horizon Academy children’s term, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the imaginary magic school in the United Kingdom that was created by Harry Potter famed J. K. Rowling in her amazing imagination) that could provide the children opportunities and avenues in higher education in Sri Lanka and abroad, also guide them into the entry level ‘job market’ without wasting their youth, like what happened to me in the prime of my youth due to lack of proper guidance and opportunities.

Dian and me at Hela Clothing Head Office, Colombo – Photo Credits – Lalisha Kahatapitiya

Horizon Lanka Website’s second edition in 2002

This was the homepage of the second edition of the Horizon Lanka http://www.horizonlanka.org website I created in February, 2002 – 14 years ago. It was this version of our website brought us both local and international fame. Many said it is clean and cute, but people could not say it was like Google home because Google was not this famous then. (People used Yahoo and AltaVista to search those days.) It was mainly due to unconditional support extended to me by my boss Dian Gomes and colleagues Ransith Fernando and Gamunu Wickramasingha of Slimline, a fully owned subsidiary of MAS Holding, that enabled me to enjoy unlimited and uninterrupted Internet – at a time it was a luxury limited to only for few people – that helped me design this website.

Horizon Lanka Website – Second Edition

I learnt web designing first in 2001 from Mr. Donald Gaminitillake – not to mention Mrs. Bhadra Gaminitillake’s hot milk coffees till late hours. Mr. Gaminitillake hates Windows and I was “forced to :-)” do the first version of the Horizon Lanka website in 2000 with an Apple Mac which had only Japanese operating system and the other software. I do not know any Japanese despite my two trips to Japan. The first Horizon Lanka website was designed with stubborn Netscape Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer given as part of Netscape Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communicator. This second version of the Horizon Lanka website was designed (again with Mr. Gaminitillake’s guiding and Mrs. Gaminitllake’s hot milk coffee) with Adobe GoLive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_GoLive, another hot web designing tool those days but nobody else I met knew what this was. This was much easier than Adobe Dreamweaver but Adobe did away with GoLive after buying out Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Horizon Lanka Website Second Edition 2002 – Dream Computer Room

I can still remember what Ranjith Gunarathne, then a freelance journalist, wrote about us in the ICT monthly “.com” published by Shelton Manage, an entrepreneurial publisher who took a lot of risks to be part of the ICT field at a time only few dared to. Those who dared, people like Shelton and N. P. Wijerathna were fearlessly hustled by some up to a point that the former two was almost forced to leave the field.

Horizon Lanka Website Second Edition 2002 – Computer Club

It was veteran journalist Gamini Akmeemana of Daily Mirror that wrote about Horizon Lanka first http://www.horizonlanka.org/in-the-media/ips-1999/ and Ranjith Gunarathne was the first http://www.horizonlanka.org/in-the-media/dotcom-2002/ to write about us in a Sinhala magazine. I adore both these articles to date and could ‘almost’ read both the reports by heart.