“I love you wildly, insanely, infinitely.”

The quote is from the movie Doctor Zhivago and it crystallises the principle towards the work that I have done throughout my career.

My name is Raja Dhavamoney, and I’m a creative entrepreneur from Sri Lanka. Over the past four decades, I’ve been involved in various projects close to my heart, and I’m happy to share my journey with you.

I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and started an advertising firm, First & Forward, which eventually became one of Sri Lanka’s premier agencies. Word began to spread about our facilities, and soon, we caught the attention of the who’s who of businesses on the Island.

To name a few, our clientele included Bank of Ceylon, Emerald Shirts Bata, Sanyo, Maliban Biscuits, Eveready, Glaxo Ceylon, Mercantile Investments, Tootal Thread, Hatton National Bank, Little Lion, among many others. To date, we have never advertised liquor, cigarettes, and lottery as a matter of principle.

The reputation and rewards we garnered from our work led me to start a print and packing company, Fast Print Service, and an outdoor advertising company—Frontline—both of which saw multitudes of success in their own right.

After 30 years in the industry, I passed the baton and moved on to my pet projects I am passionate about. Nature mesmerises me. It has crept into every corner of my imagination and laid hold of me. So much so, I am hopelessly in love with it. The twitter of birds, the misty morning awakening of a jungle, the green canopy of a forest path, and fantasy of flowers are experiences that have complemented my professional pursuits from art to floriculture.

Over the past 12 years, I have been the chairman of Flori Farms, in Hatton, Sri Lanka. Our dedicated staff plant, water, nurture and hand-cut Gerberas, Phalaenopsis, Chrysanthemum, Gypsophila, and Lisianthus. We are Sri Lanka’s only florist who grows and sells over 25 varieties of mini Gerberas. I am incredibly proud that our farm doesn’t use any plastics from planting the seeds to packing for delivery.

Beyond flowers, the fauna of the sub-continent enthralls me.  So, I decided to document the magnificent wildlife across India and Sri Lanka for my photography book “In Love with Nature,” which is available for download.

In the recent past, I opened a holiday bungalow in Sri Lanka, which was a 150-year-old colonial-style building perched among tea gardens, dense vegetation and wildlife, but now I have shifted the centre of my activity to Hatton.