Unifying spirit of Reggae
View(s):Prhlad Prana Cave, Chairman of the Survival Reggae Clubs of Australia and Sri Lanka, would like nothing better in the next five years than to find his successor. He helped found the local chapter of the Survival Reggae Club with Sunil Pathirana in 2009 and has since been guiding and offering financial support to the group. Now, on one of his regular visits to the island, he tells the Mirror Magazine, “my great wish is to hand over my Sri Lankan position in the next five years to a local that fully understand and practises the guidelines of the Reggae Club,which is to love and respect all beings as they are in the eyes of God, and to use our time and energy practising and promoting these values.”
Prhlad with musician friends. Pic by Nilan Maligaspe
Prhlad has been coming to Sri Lanka since 1983 – more recently to escape the Australian winters. This is his seventh visit to the island since 2008. “It was then that I met Sunil Rasta and during that first meeting we formulated a plan to cooperatively work towards establishing a Reggae Club similar to the one that I had been actively involved in since 1984 in Australia,which was originally founded by Bob Marley during his ‘Survival’ album tour to Australia,” says Prhlad.
On this trip, they’re packing a lot in. The band performed along the south coast and later the east coast. “When we perform we offer the opportunity to members of the audience to step up onto the stage and share whatever musical skills they have in the spirit of encouraging the creative and unifying spirit of playing music,” he says, describing their performances. “Our belief is that music is a universal language that unitespeople of all class, colour, race, age and gender and this is one ofthe fundamental aspects of the club.” This time, Prhlad has also brought along members of the Survival Reggae Club of Australia to perform and support the Reggae Clubin Sri Lanka.
He says he’s pleased to see how the local chapter has gone from strength to strength under Sunil. Prhlad believes music allows the club to fulfil some of its key social functions –in particular education and integration of all memberso f the community without discrimination to age, race, religion orgender. Prhlad is hoping to return in November, when the season is on, to develop the Reggae Club eve further. More on the west coast of Sri Lanka. “Originally Sunil and I envisioned taking local and overseas musicians on tour and performing free concerts all over Sri Lanka to promote unity in the community through music and musical workshops, under thebanner of ‘one nation, one flag, many different races’,” he says. Every trip to Sri Lanka only makes the dream more real.