The charges for the occasion at the Porchester Hall on 3rd February 2001 also cost nearly as much. Some people often complain that they were not invited into the committees for this project and you have a mind of your own and difficult to work with you. A. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but I will tell you some thing and that is, it is very difficult to persuade people to contribute even small amounts of money. Except for a very small number of cheques which were received in recent years and these we diverted straight to other Sinhala organisations - the reluctance of people to contribute is very dispiriting. But the reluctance is also partly due to the fact that many believe in the past some individuals had collected money from the public, but the money had disappeared .
Allegations are that some even set up private businesses.
As a result, even the few people who were concerned enough to want to contribute money for the Sri Lankan cause, stopped giving. It was because of this difficulty of getting our people to contribute any money that I stopped even asking people, and from that time on, all my efforts for three years, I even published a newspaper called Sri Lanka International were financed by me. Q. People have said that the programme is too long going on from 10.00 in the morning till 1.30 the next morning. Because of this, though substantial numbers of people have been turning up, it gives the illusion that the numbers are low because the crowd is dispersed over more than fifteen hours. The Sri Lanka centre is intended to perform the function of a permanent centre.