Dr. Neelan will be all the more missed because of his immense dynamism and his outstanding scholarship. Within a short space of time, Neelan gathered a wealth of experience, all of which he put to good use so that mankind was the richer for his contribution. His murder proves that a person can be physically removed but you cannot hope to destroy his ideas or his thinking.

Always modest and gentle by nature and appearance, Neelan was never obtrusive or aggressive. My experience of him was that he would meekly set forth his case and leave it to his listeners to accept his arguments or reject them. But these could not readily be ignored for on further reflection, they contained pearls of wisdom. There were times when we strongly disagreed but invariably we ended on Neelan’s side. Sri Lanka has thus lost not merely a great man of peace but has been deprived of the services of a great pacifist. He is indeed the last great peace maker our island will have. Only time will tell the damage this will cause.

Neelan represented a mix of the three strands of Tamil nationalism that evolved in our island. The first was the Arunachalam - Ramanathan tradition. Urbane and sophisticated, this strand of liberal and secular nationalism endeavoured to eschew religious fundamentalism and parish pump politics. It lasted till around the early twenties.

The second strand pervaded the nineteen twenties best manifested by K. Balasingham, Sir Ambalavanar Kanagasabai and the gentlemen of the (Jaffna) Tamil Maha Jana Sabhai. The men of this genre maintained a thin veneer of Tamil communalism but attempted at all times, to preserve the golden ideals of Arunachalam, notwithstanding Ramanathan’s cynicism.

The third strand, essentially the precursor of the Tamil demand for federalism and the vibrant and assertive nationalism of Velupillai Pirabakaran and his Liberation Tigers, was the proto-nationalism given expression to, by the "man of iron" who mesmerized the Tamil people with his powerful oratory and all pervasive charisma, G. G. Ponnambalam.

Neelan’s dynamic mind imbibed a little bit of all three strands but his unfortunate flaw was that he could not use all this rich experience to evolve a new ideology. To this extent, he failed to find a new road to Damascus.