Bye-bye, guru

Sometimes, it takes a death to realise how important someone was in shaping your life.

IN a more ideal world, British-born science-fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke and I would have been sipping iced tea on the veranda overlooking the verdant garden of my bungalow somewhere in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, while I proceeded to tell him what he’d been doing wrong for the last couple of decades of his writing career.