Growing up in the suburbs of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo and attending high school in the capital, I am blessed with the remarkable fortune to enter the university as a first-generation student during a separatist war and a revolt against the government, combined to form a civil war. Like many kids in my generation, I was lucky enough to survive as a young kid in both conflicts with some close encounters with all sides (a few of these events are narrated in "Stories from Sri Lanka's Civil War"). Some kids joined one of the two insurgencies or the military campaigns against those and sacrificed their lives with more than 100,000 others. When the civil war escalated into the closing of the universities, I worked at the family printing press in the heart of Colombo. When the Central Bank - our biggest client and my father's workplace - was bombed, it put an end to the printing business.