My husband Michael Thambynayagam spoke about our friend Nihal Pancratius at the speech he gave at the Canadian St Patrick's College, Jaffna Alumni Gala dinner in 2012 “I was very fortunate to spend my formative years at St. Patrick's College against a background of relative prosperity in the Jaffna peninsula. It was the sixties; I was in my teens, a teenager who loved music. Sixties was the decade that gave us the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Woodstock concert, Simon and Garfunkel and Edith Piaf. At home, it was the decade in which, Amarar Vaniasingam led the Thirumalai Yatherai and the Tamil people, for the first time, expressed their desire to be equal and free through an act of Ahimsa, the Satyagraham at Jaffna Kacheri. At St Patrick's, a man called Nihal Pancratius gave us a band of music where the East met the West”.