A brilliant mind endowed with many talents

Dr. Nihal S. Nagahawatte, who died last week, was affiliated with St. Joseph’s Hospital at Wayne, New Jersey (NJ), where he served as Chairman of the Department of Paediatrics and the Medical Director for the Wayne School System, until he retired in 1999.

He did his residency and training in Paediatrics at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey. He started his practice in 1978 in Totowa and in 1982 moved his office to Parish Dr, Wayne, NJ.

He founded “Wayne Paediatrics” and was a bright and dedicated physician who loved his patients, when he was taken away by Alzheimer’s, at an early age of 53.

In 2000, St Joseph’s honoured him with the Distinguished Physician award, bestowed upon a physician for outstanding leadership, dedication and advocacy for healthcare system, hospital and patients.

Back in Sri Lanka, he excelled in his primary school and was a recipient of a scholarship when he attended Nalanda College. In 1964, he was the only student to be admitted from Nalanda College to study Medicine at the Sri Lanka Medical School, Colombo.

Born December 19, 1945, his par- ents were Santis and Violet Nagahawatte. Nihal was the third among five siblings--two brothers and two sisters.

After graduation in 1969, he worked as a doctor for five years in Sri Lanka and fulfilled his civic duties to the country that gave him free education before migrating to USA in 1975.

He met his future wife Nelum Karunaratne, in February 1975 and migrated to the USA two weeks after their wedding in June 1975.

He travelled the world with his wife and friends. He loved playing tennis and later became a passionate golfer. He loved music, singing, dancing and was a connoisseur of fine food and wine.

He lived an extraordinary life with Nelum in Wayne and Franklin Lakes. He was blessed with two lovely daughters, Neoma Nagahawatte and Dr Tanya Ohly of New York. Neoma and Pete, Tanya and Jack, have given him two grandsons Benjamin and Oliver and a granddaughter Raya.

A devoted Buddhist who practised his religion in his daily life, he was a kind and generous man, beyond words. BA

Bemunuge is a rare surname in Sri Lanka. “Zeno” as a first name is even rarer. Zeno Nihal Bemunuge or “Bema” as he was popularly known was a man with the rarest of qualities. He was endowed with immense intelligence and talent. With his outspoken philosophical views and rationalistic attitudes, Bema more than justified his parents’ decision to name him after Zeno, the great pre-Socratic philosopher.

Everything about Bema was unique. His handwriting was out of the ordinary and so were his mannerisms, style of speaking, his life style etc. His knowledge in the profession he practised, electrical engineering, was remarkable and I am yet to meet a person who is more thorough in the fundamentals of electrical engineering than him. He was equally proficient in many other fields widely different from engineering such as wine making, cookery, astronomy, theology, English literature etc.

My first meeting with Bema was at Laxapana, when I joined the power station as an Operations Engineer. Bema was a senior hand there and was in charge of the Old Laxapana power station maintenance. We all lived in the “Building site” at Laxapana and Bema and his lovely wife Romaine were regular visitors to our abode, the bachelor’s kingdom known as the “OE’s Bungalow”. Or else every evening we used to meet in the famous Laxapana club. All of us used to enjoy a drink in the evening, play a game of billiards or snooker and it was the order of the day for Bema to start a conversation on some topic, varying from electrical engineering, theology or even theory of relativity.

Bema and Romaine left for Zambia having secured employment in the copper mines and were there for a few years. On their return to Sri Lanka he joined LECO and that was the second time we started working under the same roof. He made valiant efforts to improve the reliability of the electricity supply in LECO areas, and was very particular on the use of good quality products. He was strict on the manufacturing standards of all the equipment used in the distribution system and this made most equipment manufacturers to consider him as a nuisance. Some local industries took his criticism in the right spirit and this helped them to improve their products to compete even at international level. His statistics on the power failures and the equipment failures were meticulous and employing such information he justified his decisions convincingly.

Romaine’s unfortunate demise about a decade back was unbearable for Bema and he never recovered from it. Knowing his father’s plight, his son Ryan decided to abandon his studies and come back to Sri Lanka to be with him.All these and many other unforeseen events made Bema to leave his employment and to serve as an independent electrical engineering consultant. Ryan became his assistant as well as his best friend

I lost contact with him after I decided to leave LECO. It was quite late in the day we got the news that he was ill and was being taken care of by Ryan with some of his faithful friends from LECO.

Bema did not do justice to the immense intelligence, talent and skills he was endowed with. He was a man with a large heart and was ever ready to give a helping hand to anyone.At this stage, I only could pray “that his soul may rest in eternal peace”, but had Bema been living, this would have given rise to a long and fruitful heart to heart chat. JK