Chapter 34\ The adventures of a tea expert, in MENA

I returned to Lebanon and soon a management change was announced at the Ceylon Tea Board’s operation in MENA. T.G. Peiris was summoned to Colombo, where he was transferred to his country’s diplomatic corps. Then we heard that he had been assigned to a counsellor post overseas and his Ceylon Tea Board experience would have certainly contributed to his promotion. In his place, a new chief commissioner by the name of Ranjan Perera was assigned to take the helm of the Middle East and North Africa operation towards the end of 1975.

Perera was a relaxed and jolly person who instantly developed close personal relationships with all his new stakeholders, be it the ad agency staff or the tea traders.  Ranjan seemed to have had different types of contacts in Colombo, for early in his mandate he called me in for a meeting, which he made a point of holding at his Eldorado building office in Hamra Street on a weekend when no one else was in the office. When we settled down, he asked in a low voice if I had any contacts within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). To soften the surprise, I seem to have shown, he explained that he had been delegated by the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, to meet and extend an invitation for the Fifth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement to Yaser Arafat (Abou Ammar), chairman of the PLO, who was a resident of Lebanon at that time. My life-time friend Rafic Najjar came to the rescue, since Najjar Continental was amongst the trusted suppliers of printing presses, photocopiers, and typewriters to the PLO. Rafic helped arrange the meeting, but my client insisted on not going alone, so the PLO agreed that I could accompany him.

We were picked up from the entrance of the Eldorado building at 8am sharp and were driven in an old, battered Mercedes to the Beirut Arab University area, where we were asked to get into another car. We then drove along the crowded Sabra Street to a narrow alley, where our driver and his armed front seat companion blindfolded us for the rest of the drive. The building where we stopped had several armed guards within the main entrance and on every floor that the lift stopped. Then we were escorted to a waiting room where we were searched again, and our identity documents further checked.

Finally, we were invited into an office whose guard insisted on offering us very sweet tea, which turned into a topic of humorous conversation. This helped the two of us release some of our tension until Farouk Kaddoumi (Abou Al Loutouf), the PLO’s foreign affairs officer, walked in and apologized on behalf of Abou Ammar, explaining that he had been delegated to receive the invitation to the summit. On the way back to civilization and the crowds on Hamra Street, Ranjan laughingly whispered that he had come to our explosive part of the world comforted by the thought that he was going to be marketing Ceylon Tea, but this recent adventure had allowed him the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with “freedom fighters”.

Together with Ranjan, we widened the reach of our educational campaign by targeting youngsters via the children’s comics that had recently been launched by a company called The Illustrated Publications. Laila Da Cruz, the company’s managing director, and her lady assistants went out of their way to help us feature Tarzan, Superman and Little Lulu, not only drinking Ceylon Tea, but also experimenting with the preparation of iced tea and participating to competitions that introduced Arab children to all the splendors of this tea-growing island.

Ranjan was replaced two years later by another chief commissioner, Rodney Arambawella, who had been responsible for the Ceylon Tea Center at Piccadilly Circus in London. My tours with Rodney amongst the tea importers of the Gulf States brought to the surface a general request for Ceylon Tea to be made available in tea bags, just as Lipton and Brooke Bond were quickly improving their market share following the introduction of this convenient method of preparing tea. Rodney replied, wherever we went, with the standard statement of his conservative bosses, that tea bags can be only filled with the lowest grade of tea particles, and the tea they were exporting was much superior.

The population of the Gulf States was changing rapidly, and a growing number of young families were stepping out of the traditional two and three-generation family houses. At the same time, the number of expatriate settlers was soaring, attracted by job opportunities and high pay. All these young households were after convenience, while the people behind the tea business in Sri Lanka, despite all the campaigns that we had launched locally targeting the younger generation, continued to underestimate, and accordingly ignore, this changing reality. Ceylon Tea did not change its retail format. Sadly, this led to the closure of the Ceylon Tea Board in Beirut and to the conclusion of a marketing case that had all the ingredients to succeed but did not because of rigidness.