Word: ceylon
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Whenever one of his subordinates suggested that an extra bodyguard might be a good thing to have around, wiry, fragile-looking Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, 60, would only laugh. Proud of being known as "the people's Premier" of Ceylon, "Banda" refused to worry about personal safety, almost every morning would throw open his rambling bungalow on Colombo's shady Rosemead Place to all who wanted...
...Christian and educated at Oxford, where his debating skill earned him the admiration of his English classmate, Anthony Eden. But once back home, Banda renounced Christianity in favor of Buddhism, threw off Western dress in favor of long white sarongs, and plunged into the movement that was to bring Ceylon independence within the Commonwealth in 1948. In 1951 he set up his own Marxist Ceylon Freedom Party. Five years later he was, as Eden had predicted, his country's Prime Minister...
...brought him down. His assassin turned out to be a 43-year-old monk who practices the traditional Ayurvedic (native) medicine-a secret method of treatment with herbs and massage. According to Colombo police, the monk bore a personal grudge against Banda, presumably because of his refusal to rid Ceylon of its modern doctors...
Within an hour after the monk's bullets found their mark, Ceylon's tough, puckish Governor General Sir Oliver Goonetilleke proclaimed what amounted to a state of emergency over Ceylon-a volatile land that boasts the highest homicide rate in Asia. But next day, as Banda's like-minded colleague, Education Minister Wijayananda Dahanayake, took over the premiership, a strange quiet settled over the country. Taxis, buses and cars flew mourning flags of white; the only hint of violence lay in a rising wave of public feeling against the Buddhist clergy. In Colombo a two-mile-long...
...successor to the hapless Maxwell H. Gluck of Manhattan, who, shortly before his departure for Ceylon, won nationwide jeers-and new U.S. fame for Bandaranaike-by admitting to the Senate that he could not "call off" the Ceylonese Prime Minister's name...