Kala Keerthi Regi Siriwardena (15 May 1922 – 15 December 2004) was a Sri Lankan academic, journalist, poet, writer, playwright and writer of screenplays. Early life and education Reginald Siriwardena (known as 'Reggie' until the 1980s) was born in the Colombo suburb of Ratmalana to Sinhalese Buddhist parents. His Macaulay-quoting father sent him for his schooling first to St. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia where he found the Anglican elite colonial atmosphere uncomfortable. In his poem 'Colonial Cameo', he remembers the day his mother, who only spoke Sinhala, took him to school and said 'goodbye' in that tongue, to the amusement of his English-speaking classmates: My mother pretended not to hear that insult. The snobbish little bastards! But how can I blame them? That day I was deeply ashamed of my mother. Now, whenever I remember, I am ashamed of my shame. – Regi Siriwardena, Colonial Cameo He later went to Ananda College, where he felt rather more at home in an atmosphere that combined his father's Western classical erudition with the home-grown culture of his mother. He was awarded a scholarship to University College, Colombo, and read English under E. F. C. Ludowyk and Doric de Souza, graduating with a University of London degree. Student activism While at university during the Second World War, he joined the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). He became part of the underground leadership of the LSSP under the pseudonym 'Hamid' and attracted the attention of the British authorities as an anti-colonial activist. One of his tasks was arranging a safe house for Dr Colvin R de Silva after the latter's escape from prison on 5 April 1942. After the war, he became critical of the LSSP's evolution from its loose pre-war socialist ideology towards a more anti-Stalinist, orthodox Trotskyist stand, leaving it in 1946. Teaching & journalism career After graduating he taught English at Ananda College and at Royal College, Colombo. A few years later, the former LSSP member Esmond Wickremesinghe, by then a Cold War conservative, recruited Siriwardena as a journalist on the Ceylon Daily News, part of the Lake House Group of Wickremesinghe's father-in-law, D. R. Wijewardena. Here he worked among fellow left or leftish intellectuals such as Herbert Keuneman, Bonny Fernando and Jeanne Hoban, who had been head-hunted by the shrewd Wickremasinghe. In the early 1960s, the closeness of Lake House to the right-wing United National Party caused Siriwardena to leave