#tamil diaspora

[languagexs]

Exploring the Rich History and Cultural Contributions of the Tamil Language

Unraveling the Rich Tapestry of the Tamil Language and Culture Are you fascinated by the diverse linguistic landscapes of the world? Let’s get on a journey through the captivating realm of the Tamil language – a classical language steeped in a rich cultural heritage that spans centuries. Brace yourself for an exploration that will unveil the timeless beauty and intricacies of this ancient…

[sembulapeyalneerpol]

Curious for my Tamil followers/moots who aren't Eezham tamils, when did you learn about the Eezham struggle and the genocide of Tamils? how relevant was it to you growing up?

I'm going over a conversation I had with someone who I knew who is iyengar who said they and their community, didn't have any context or connection to that struggle and it...kind of blew my mind but clarified a lot for me about it.

It's the fifteenth year anniversary of the final campaign of genocide of tamils by Sri lanka and I know many of my Eezham Tamil friends are always surprised by other tamils ignorance of it.

[tragedykery]

ok wait no on second thought I actually can believe my obscurify rating bc 1) I’ve mostly been playing songs by the most popular artists I listen to (mitski & hozier) on the piano & singing them instead of streaming them on spotify & 2) none of you bitches listen to music that isn’t english

[welcometotheravenclawcommonroom]

(South) Indian Harry Potter Headcanons:

Harry knew he was Indian (mostly because the Dursley’s used to say racist shit to him) but he didn’t know where in India the potters were from until he went to Hogwarts. He finds out from the Patils, who were close with the potters because desis stick together.

The Patils are from the north and use Hindi to speak to each other. Neither of them knows Telugu/Tamil/Marathi/Malayalam/insert Southern language of choice here (I personally headcanon Telugu because it’s the only Indian language I speak and because there’s a huge diaspora of telugumandi in the west, but feel free to choose whatever you’d like). So Harry has to rediscover his heritage language on his own.

He also studies Sanskrit, and it opens up a HUGE world of spells that they don’t teach at Hogwarts (because of course Indian wizards don’t do spells in Latin). He and the Patils know a bunch of spells that nobody else does.

Harry’s pleat game is ON POINT. It makes sense, since he had to do all the chores at the Dursley’s and that includes perfectly folded and ironed laundry with the edges aligned neatly, or else he would risk being punished. But the result is that if you want your saree drape to pass the inspection of even the most judgemental auntie, you go to Harry to help with your pleats.

Even when they’ve graduated and all have their own homes, it’s a pretty regular sight for the Patil twins to come through Harry’s floo, half dressed, to have Harry pleat their sarees or their lehenga dupatta for them.

Harry LOVES spices. The dursleys only liked bland food, but Harry has always liked flavorful foods, and has no problem with (hot) spicy food either. He uses lots of spices in his own cooking now. His food is very flavorful, but when he’s cooking for himself, it’s too spicy for all his friends (even the Patils). So nobody can eat his leftovers unless he was specifically cooking with other people in mind. Ron learned this the first time he rummaged through Harry’s fridge after a night of drinking. Now Harry labels all his food as to whether or not it’s “Harry spicy”.

James LOVED to buy Lily sarees. He’d order them with custom, wizard-themed designs from weaving villages in south India. The women who made them assumed he was just very imaginative, so he wasn’t violating the statute of secrecy since saree patterns are often vibrant and unique. Harry finds some of them in the old potter manor, and they still smell like the perfumes and scented oils his mother would wear when James took her to the local temple for Hindu holidays.

Indian witches often store extra magic in or enchant pieces of their copious jewelry with spells that can keep them safe if they’re ever in a situation where they don’t have their wands. stuff like, each bangle can function as an emergency portkey that can take you to different safe locations if you say the activation word, or ones that create an instant magical shield when you tap them. Harry finds some of his mothers gajulu, gives them to his female friends.

He ties Rhaki on Ron and Neville, and all the weasley boys. Ron was the first person he ever tied it on, because Ron was the first person who he ever bonded with, and his closest brother.

Harry always cooks idli sambar or dosa for his friends for breakfast the next morning after a night of drinking together, and it’s the perfect hangover food because it definitely brings you back to full alertness/knocks the last bit of post-hangover grogginess right out of your system.

Harry’s parselmouth abilities are valued in his native culture because of the sacredness of snakes in Hinduism, and it comes to be something he’s really proud of (personally I think the ‘parselmouth connected to the horcrux’ thing is dumb, so I’ve always imagined Harry was just naturally a parselmouth).

As the number of Indian immigrants/expats continues to grow after they graduate, Harry helps some of his students (he’s the DADA teacher) start the Hogwarts “South Asian Student Union”.

He always has snacks out for his students when they come to visit his office hours, and they’re all Indian snacks and sweets. His personal favorite is kaju barfi, but he always has a good variety of both sweet and spicy treats, especially for stressed out owl and newts students.

He collaborates with Hermione, who works in the ministry, to make it mandatory for Hogwarts students to a “foreign magical language” course so they can broaden both their minds and their spell repertoires. Padma Patil becomes the “Sanskrit Spells” teacher, and Seamus teaches “Irish Gaelic”. (It took him a little longer to get his course started, since it turns out that at least 40% of Gaelic spells are just increasingly complicated and violent ways to repel the English).

Hermione and Harry also work together to make sure there are employees in the international magical cooperation department who specialize in post-colonial relations, because the magical world also has its issues with that colonialist mindset towards countries that were formerly part of the empire.

Just south Indian Harry embracing his heritage, learning about what was ripped from him, and using it to enact meaningful change in a multicultural magical society.

[metamatar]

it's funny but when i was young and growing up in tamil nadu and maharashtra but punjabi by heritage i was legit giving myself for a lack of a better word diaspora style neuroses. punjabi culture as presented to me by my extended family or mainstream culture was either refugee partition trauma or genuinely noxious live big gaddi guddi gedi stuff in the era of honey singh. people expect you to be like charismatic and in love with food and willing to have a good time when you're punjabi and i was a fucking teenage nerd. what i could do was like idolise periyarism and ambedkarism instead.

[hussyknee]

Let me make this very clear right now.

Israel is not a legitimate state.

Zionism is no longer an abstract belief in a Jewish homeland but the ideological battleground of pro-Israeli colonizers.

Bombing two million civilians in an open air prison in retaliation for the actions of the underground militia you empowered by invading a country and killing civilians for decades is still genocide.

If you believe objecting to the razing of Gaza means supporting Hamas's attacks on Israeli civilians you are simply justifying genocide.

Look up the bombing of Warsaw 1944

The US has elected to support this open war crime.

Which is what the US's entire military history has been about.

If you try to whitewash or apologize for Biden to stop the USAmerican left splintering in next year's election you are a racist imperialist scumbucket who's already proving you will never hold your leaders accountable.

None of this excuses going after vulnerable Jewish minorities in the rest of the world, in fact, the more you harrass and endanger them, the more you will shore up support for Israel, because scared people have no choice but to circle their wagons around the only people offering them refuge.

This is exactly what happens to Palestinians with Hamas. Persecution of minorities leave them no choice but to support whoever will defend them.

For people to make better choices they must have the freedom to choose.

Support for Palestine must be unequivocal, because peace only happens when you take the chainsaw away from a maniac trying to kill people with it for throwing rocks at them.

This is not a fight against Jews but against the violent colonial apartheid state created by USA and Britain because they didn't want to deal with the Jewish refugees and but wanted a foothold in the Middle East. It meant they could frame the Jewish diaspora as people that belonged to another country and manipulate them via a state over which they had no representation or political agency. It is effectively a Sword of Damocles they have been dangling over the heads of Jewish diasporas disguised as support for a Jewish homeland.

Fascism knows no race or religion. It's about fear and power sold as the price of stability and safety. No group of humans will ever be inoculated against its lure, no matter how keenly they have suffered.

No human being is acceptable collateral. If you fire on a human shield you are as much murderer as those holding them up and must answer for it.

I will be treating any discourse on this as a free blocklist. My people, the Sinhalese, did exactly this to Sri Lankan Tamils. There are no variations in the ethnofascist playbook. The blood on our hands will never wash away, and it will not for you either.

"Yeah but Palestinians elected Hamas in a free and fair election—" y'all elected Bush twice because a handful of Saudis killed 3000 people in one attack. So maybe understand that terrified people who are actually being genocided also want to be led by the biggest bully, and shut the fuck up.

[joyland2022]

if you're a first or second gen immigrant, pleaaaase play venba. this cooking game about a tamil family it is one of the most incisive and honest depictions of a south asian diaspora family dynamic i've ever seen.

[thozhar]

In the episode Hometown, the narrative delves intriguingly into the cord between the Tamil Muslim diaspora and their ties to the Tamil Motherland, unveiling a unique transnational culture distinct from that of the Indentured Tamils, who form the ancestral roots of most Malaysian Tamils today. Throughout the narrative, viewers encounter characters proudly listing their ancestral villages such as Alangankulam, Panaikulam, Saanthankulam, and Chittarkottai, all nestled within the Ramnad district, a stark contrast to the reality of most Indentured Tamils, who struggle to even identify the district their ancestors had come from. While this intimacy between the diaspora and the mainland is alien to the displaced Indentured Tamils, the narrative presented in the mockumentary form a parallel with the descendants of wealthy Tamil Hindus and Christians who may still bear strong connections to the Tamil lands.

This contrast is also important to note between Tamil Muslims and the Indentured Tamils because it reveals the plurality of both the Malaysian Tamil community, and the contradictory contexts of migration, which have never been linear. While this comparison is between these two distinct but related communities, the narrative however, introspects upon other Tamil Muslims who do not have a transnational link to their ancestral village in Tamil Nadu. The narrative ruptures this hegemonic view of the connections between the Tamil Muslim diaspora and Tamil Nadu, by expressing that to bear no link doesn’t completely uproot one’s identity, consciousness, and culture.

Shafie notes that the insistence within the community to inquire and investigate the roots of another Malaysian Tamil Muslim does not come merely from an innocent sense of curiosity but arises through the need to access how they would need to treat the other person and how they should relate to the other person. In the micro-series, we witness how a character simply stating that his native is Ampang causes dissatisfaction within others, who continue pestering him about his roots. To this annoyance, the simple yet piercing line of “oorachum mayirachum” is delivered; it interprets not just a retort against annoyance but also an affliction against the idea that a person can be reduced to land he bears severed connections with. It iterates that the connection to land alone cannot encapsulate both the dialectical consciousness of man and his ancestral soil.

— The Bhais: Tamil Muslim Mockumentary Explores the Complexities of Being a Minority within a Minority

[clonerightsagenda]

Kat's Top Books of 2023

Was inspired by someone else's post to do a Kat's top 5 books of the year post culling from my #recently reads. I read a lot this year and encountered a lot of great titles, but these ones were particularly memorable:

Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde. Interconnected short stories following the lives of queer misfits and outcasts in Nigeria. I have a passage saved on my phone. I read this back in January so I don't remember the contents as much as the feelings it evoked, but it was beautiful and haunting.

Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones. Read My Heart is a Chainsaw first if you haven't already. The books pit Jade Daniels, a young woman with a trauma she's refusing to face head on but instead buries in an obsession with the moral logic of slasher films, against irl slashers who keep coming to town. Bonus points for wired jaw representation, aka my future.

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Set during the Sri Lankan civil war following a young Tamil woman who's caught in the middle as loved ones join the Tigers. It starts with a striking passage that you think means one thing and then comes back later in a way you don't expect that's a huge gut punch.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez. A high fantasy story that is also a diaspora story as the characters' scattered descendants watch history play out. Dips into everyone's thoughts to create a chorus POV that's really effective. Note - incredibly gruesome. Organs, lovingly described, etc.

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach. A stoned art teacher accidentally creates a golem who decides his mission is to stop an upcoming alt right rally. Explores the interactions between the old world and the new and the weight of historical trauma - every golem shares the same ancestral memory. Carries its tensions to the very last page and leaves the reader to supply the answers.

(Honorable mention to System Collapse which didn't make it into the #recently read posts, but I had a great time!)

Nonfiction shoutout to A City on Mars which sourced so many delightful space facts and gave me a lot to think about re: SF worldbuilding that is at all grounded in reality. Plus it was really funny.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2023-10-16

Another year older. Stealing the Untitled Wednesday Library Series format from Morrak for an open Reading section and then we'll get to the normal post.

Reading:

Untitled Monday Wednesday Library Entry No. 0

Do you like a recipe book? Do you like an unbearably comprehensive and frequently incorrect recipe book? Well boy do I have an item for you:

It's Indian Delights, the de facto standard book of South African Indian cooking. Assembled in the 60's by the Durban Women's Cultural Group and in print ever since then.

The How

A birthday gift from my parents, who sent it from South Africa.

There are apparently places that carry this book outside of South Africa but I do not know what those are.

The Text

Dubious, but useful despite this. It was written in the 60's by a bunch of people who had never and would never again write a recipe book. You may note from the frontmatter that while it has had sixteen impressions since its first publication in 1961, there has only ever been a single revision of the book. There are numerous errors, omissions, and flaws. Recipes may list ingredients that are not used, call for ingredients in the method not given before, begin preparing components and never use them, or outright lie about the quantities of ingredients you need. A challenging exercise.

Any given individual's copy of this book is full of little pen notes, slips of paper, and scratched out experiments. I have a blank canvas.

It is absolutely stuffed to the brim with recipes from the then-almost-century of South African development on South Asian cuisine. It is intended as a one-stop-shop for cooking from a diaspora of extremely wide origins.

South African Indians arrived in South Africa as indentured labour for British sugar farms and could just as easily be from the relatively cold and mountainous North Indian regions or the low, rainy, hot coastal areas of South India. As a result you've had almost a hundred years of adapting to the locally available ingredients, intermarriages across wide geographic origins, and failing memories. There are frequently many duplicates of any given recipe, each with some unique variation of note.

It is also extremely dated. It still lives in an era where "adding an elachi (cardamom) pod to your rice" is a luxurious choice that requires financial considerations, and where meat was still expensive. It also has a delightful section on mass cooking, such as the above "Biryani for 100 people" which has an additional note on the ingredients for a "Biryani for 800 people" on the opposite leaf. These things come up sometimes, although the largest biryani I've ever been involved in was for about 60 people.

It is not really for beginners but it does have a lot of introductory matter, in part because it has to contend with the mishmash of languages and loanwords that exist. You don't know if the reader uses the hindi word for cumin, or the tamil word for cumin, or makes a formal distinction between roti and chapati. As a result, there are extensive opening tables of translations.

The Object

Big, blocky hardcover recipe book. Cheap but hardwearing coated pages. I have seen these in every imaginable state of disrepair, unfortunately I do not have a photo on hand of my mother's which is completely beat to hell.

I mentioned that there have not been many updates, and this continues to the outside. Not a single impression has, for example, corrected the misalignment of the spine and the cover that means it stands out on any book storage system.

Some damage to the cover from the rigours of air travel. It'll recover, or rather, it'll get beat up in ways that make that negligible.

The photography is antiquated, having been taken by a photographer who was certainly good but was operating a) with 1961 camera technology, b) 1961 photographic sensibilities, and c) no real experience in food photography. As a result the images can look somewhat alien if you're familiar with more modern food photograpy. Colours are not accurate, framing is flat, and composition is often packed.

In addition to the colour glamour plates, there are black and white instructional photos, which are much more timeless.

The Why, Though?

Indian Delights is a very important cultural reference for the South African Indian population, and it's a pretty standard leaving home/getting married/leaving home and getting married gift. I've bought a copy for many friends and now this one is mine.

Will I actually use this much? Certainly not that often. My mother and her sisters learned to cook from this book, so it is the root of my personal culinary tradition. That means I already know a lot of what can be distilled from this for day-to-day recipes. Where it is handy is for more technical dishes, which require some guidance, or as an ingredient reference for something new you want to try.

In particular Diwali is coming up and while both my mother and I are staunch atheists, we will also take any excuse to make a ton of sweets for friends. If you are in Prague in the week of the 12th of November you can probably hit me up for something.

Listening: Acheney is a shockingly talented synth designer for the niche softsynth tracker sunvox, available now on windows, mac, linux, windows CE, android, and iOS. I was tooling around with their Guitar synths and decided to check out their music, which is a couple albums of very high concept EDM inspired ambient and/or noise stuff. Here's Euler Characteristic Zero

Watching: @humansbgone is an animated sci-fi series about intelligent giant arthropods and their attempts to deal with invasions of pesky little humans

Big spec-bio focus with a lot of end notes on the arthropods in question.

Playing: Played the Trans Siberian Railway Simulator demo, which I recorded and put up here, with crap audio because it's authentic to what I had lying around after I forgot my headphones at work.

Also: the digital version of the D&D themed agent placement game Lord of Waterdeep with my family, which works quite well. It's weird to have the game handling the admin of moving points around and automatically deducting resources, but it does make the game go very quickly, even if your parents are still figuring out the interface.

Making: Big cooking experiment with a slow roast lamb shank. Came out very well. Lamb shank definitely one of the more animal parts of an animal you can cook. Smells intensely of lanolin and other hair smells. Real greasy. Big honkin' bone. Smooth and fine but sturdy musculature. This thing used to be a very specific part of something alive and that thing lived the kind of life that develops the very particular smells of the insides of a sheep that are very close to the outside of a sheep. You will find some wool fibers in your pan from where the follicles reach down close to the bone and sinew.

Tools and Equipment: Easyeffects is the successor to PulseEffects and is a very complete set of audio tuning and manipulation tools for Linux. You can use it to process incoming and outgoing audio with basically any plugin you care to imagine.

[website-enjoyer]

drake has been giving canadian rap a bad name lately. also, since ppl started spectating on that beef on tumblr, i’ve seen a lot of posts going around about ppl on here being super ignorant about rap - so i thought i would make a post about a few contemporary canadian rappers who are worth listening to. list below!

first up is Night Lovell. this is a personal choice cus we are from the same area code and he started releasing music while we were both in high school (although i haven’t listened to him quite as often since moving away tbh). this is a song of his i like, the video reminds me of the fun parts of my late teens:

next is Haviah Mighty, from the same city as my gf and the creator of some truly excellent gay anthems, PLEASE listen to her:

another artist who grew up in brampton is TOBi, originally from nigeria. his latest project won rap album of the year at the 2024 juno awards. listen, it's good music:

there's also lots of indigenous rappers that are extremely worth checking out. my first recommendation here would be Boslen:

another cool act is Snotty Nose Rez Kids, a duo from the haisla nation. i don't listen to them as much but they have some really strong tracks, like this one:

next i want to mention a couple rappers from the sri lankan tamil diaspora in canada. first, SVDP. his mridangam raps series is a really cool blend of musical traditions. this is a song from him i like:

and secondly NAVZ-47, who is a rapper and also a beautiful singer. this is a great song of hers:

lastly, and probably my current favourite canadian rapper — u already know it’s Backxwash, originally from zambia. her music doesn’t hold back in any way, and it’s really emotionally powerful to me as another trans woman. follow her on here @backxwash !! here is her latest song, a great example of how phenomenal her lyricism and delivery are:

now u know some canadian rappers :) this is nowhere near an exhaustive list obviously, i just had to end the post at some point. all of these artists have released collabs with others that are worth checking out so if u like any of these, there's ur starting point to learn more. enjoy!

[zeus-japonicus]

Trice Forgotten characters masterpost

First, a caveat that race/culture/ethnicity are obviously complicated things in both the show & in reality.  I will say very clearly that this show *does* deal with the issues with taxonomic racism, mixed-raceness and being from the diaspora. There are reasons why certain characters do not tell other characters their ethnicity/heritage/background. Saying that, assuming you're reading this so that fanwork is respectful and/or to hold these in your brain, here’s a masterpost. Note that not every person is able to / would want to describe themselves in the same way, and that countries we know have been renamed since the nineteenth century.

Alestes: Fujian & Xhosa heritage. Black Asian, African Chinese, Black and Asian. (she/her/Captain)

Baker: Black Scottish. Brought up in Mi'kma'ki around First Nations people, but is not himself. (he/him)

Siva: Tamil, from Kalitivu, neighbour to Ceylon. (he/him)

Noor: Adeni (Yemeni in contemporary parlance, from the Aden Protectorate) (they/them)

Inez: Filipino-Spanish Mestizo / Tisoy. (he/she/they/any).

Elizabeth: Black. Currently lives in Kingston, Jamaica. (Name or title “Doctor” as pronouns).

Anh: Vietnamese. (she/her)

William: white Scottish (he/him)

Gammon: white English (he/him) 

Gabriel: African American Loyalist living in Nova Scotia (perhaps an ancestor of people who come to call themselves Black Nova Scotians). (he/him)

[zine-garden]

Indigenous Zines outside of America! Buy, share, and read zines by Indigenous people outside of America.

This probably overlaps with zines from outside of North America prompt, since that is where most of the Indigenous world exists, but humour me! Any zines made by Palestinians, Hmong, Sami, Somali, Tamil, Iloko, etc.? I'll also allow the inclusion of the diasporas of these groups to make this prompt easier!

[metamatar]

I pay 5 dollars for a ziplock pouch of 30 curry patta leaves because basically there is no substitution for fresh curry patta. I need a greenhouse to grow curry patta and/or move to a city with serious tamil diaspora before I go bankrupt.

[hussyknee]

i mean as an indigenous person, the domari people and the armenian diaspora in palestine are just as indigenous as palestinians. indigneity is produced via a relationship to an oppressive, colonizing entity, not "who lived here the longest"

I don't disagree with you exactly, but colonization is also layered.

So bear in mind that my knowledge of decolonization is specifically subaltern (as in the Indian subcontinent) and patchy (disabled my whole adult life and a very start-stop-stagnate tertiary education). The Americas might be different. I'm completely open to being wrong.

In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese and Eelam Tamils are "natives" while "indigenous" are considered the Adivasi and Tamil Indigenous people in the North (I'm sorry I can't remember their names, only found out about them last year). The distinction arises because they were Austroasiatic people (and the Tamils were maybe Dravidians? Wow, ethnosupremacist black hole discovered) who arrived in migrations millennia before they were colonized by later migrants from the Indian subcontinent about 2500 years ago. Those are the progenitors of both the later Sinhalese and Tamil kingdoms. (Obviously both intermarried with the indigenous populations; ethnic identities are cultural). The Adivasi never assimilated into the Indian migrants' agrarian societies. They still engage in hunting and subsistence agriculture rooted in the ecosystems of their ancestral lands. Unlike the rest of the population, being transplanted from these lands to anywhere else in the country would result in a devastating loss culture and community.

"Indigeneity" is an extremely fraught topic in post-colonial nations when conflated with being "native". It erases the actual pre-agrarian tribes that were victims of colonization two or three times over, and is used for nationalist ethnic cleansing and the creation of ethnic underclasses. The myth that all Tamils were descendants of "Chola invaders" that arrived only a thousand years ago is foundational to Sri Lanka's Tamil genocide. Eelam Tamils themselves heavily discriminated against the Malaiyyah Tamils the British enslaved and exported from India to work their cash crops (Indian Ocean slavery is as brutal and horrific as the trans-Atlantic one). The persecution of Muslims who migrated here the last few centuries from South India, Afghanistan, Turkey and Malaysia also involves seeing them as interlopers, even though they never claimed to be native because their ethnic identities are shaped by their migrant roots and the unique ways they assimilated into Sri Lankan society. They still have ancestral lands here from which they've been ethnically cleansed and are still under threat by both Sinhalese and Tamils.

I'm not sure whether this is something unique to countries where the Europeans actually did fuck off forever. But if even if they never did, how do we discern our layers of colonization and oppression if we all believe we're indigenous? Do we ignore that the pre-agrarian societies* here are rooted primarily in the custodianship and protection of their ancestral lands, unlike the rest of us that thrive in mono-agriculture, industrial encroachment and urban sprawl (and constant ethnic violence)? Do we have to center European violence in our own understanding of ourselves and our responsibilities to acknowledge the histories and rights of minorities vulnerable to us?

To my understanding, the difference between "anti-colonial" and "decolonial" is that one is conceptualized as "resistance" and the other as "re-existence". What I've been taught is that seeing our place in the world through the white colonial lens and defining ourselves by colonial proximity is to give up our power of self-determination. We were native to this island before these violent borders imposed on us by the British ever existed, and we were native whatever kingdoms configured and reconfigured themselves over millennia. But we have also been violent colonizers of the people who were here before us, even during and after the Europeans came and went. Indigeneity afaik is acknowledging their identities and respecting the history that formed them, and the restoration of their long-obscured sovereign right to their lands independent of the nation state.

*I can't remember whether pre-civilization was a problematic term or not. I took like two modules on subaltern indigenous peoples five years apart lol.

[nonameidentified]

about that "I'm not from the us" ask set

or whatever it was written there

all

every

most is a very interesting question and I need answers because knowledge = fun

Ahhh... This is going to be long...

1. favourite place in your country?

India is a big country, okay, I haven't been to many places, but I liked kerala when I went there one time.

2. do you prefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad?

In my country, in my state, in my house. I don't like traveling.

3. does your country have access to sea?

Yeah :)

4. favourite dish specific for your country?

Creul. How dare you make me choose?

5. favourite song in your native language?

Ohhh,,,, this is hard. I don't know many songs like at all

ஆனந்த யாழை (aanandha yaazhai)

சின்ன சின்ன ஆசை (chinna chinna aasai)

உனக்கு என்ன வேணும் சொல்லு (unakku enna venum sollu)

Are they all very popular songs? Yes, as I said I don't know many songs. (How hell did I become an instrumentalist!?)

6. most hated song in your native language?

I don't think I hate any songs, like in general..

7. three words from your native language that you like the most?

Who has favorite words?! I like them all.

8. do you get confused with other nationalities? if so, which ones and by whom?

I am, unfortunately pale as fuck, so some people think I'm white (oh the horrors) and other times they think I'm from andhra side, because again pale as hell lol

9. which of your neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best?

We somehow have some level of beef with most of our neighbours,.,. Probably sri lanka, I know a decent amount about it because shared history, and it would be the easiest to travel to

10. most enjoyable swear word in your native language?

No "swear words" because language is old and we have forgotten most of them :(

11. favourite native writer/poet?

Kalki Krishnamurthy, is this a basic answer? Yes. But, I am not a book person, okay, books are scary and I haven't read many in my lifetime. I'm going based on what my mom said lol.

12. what do you think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem?

No particular feelings about it :/

13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders?

Oh, so many, but like most young people don't follow it that much. It's just something old people nag about.

14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV?

I don't watch many movies or TV shows in general, so I don't have any strong feelings towards it.

15. a saying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get?

Again, big country, varied languages. But let me think of something I can actually translate...

We call people who don't think before they speak cashew nuts (முந்திரிக்கொட்ட (Mundhiri Kotta)) because of how the the cashew nut protrudes out of the cashew fruit.

I chose a random one, there are many more, Tamil is a language built on metaphors lol

16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with?

Most hated: THE GOD DAMN INDIAN ACCENT. Like 1) it originates from the welsh accent 2)it mostly comes from north Indian diasporas 3) NORTH INDIANS ALSO DON'T HAVE THAT ACCENT.

THERE ARE 22 DIFFERENT OFFICIAL LANGUAGES AND HUNDREDS OF UNOFFICIAL ONES, HOW THE HELL IS THERE SUPPOSED TO BE AN ALL ENCOMPASSING "INDIAN ACCENT"

Also, a million others, but we don't have time for that.

Agree with: we like our spices yes :}

17. are you interested in your country’s history?

YES YES YES. 100% YES. I am a history nerd about it. I have so much history trivia. Pls someone ask me about it.

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language?

I don't know, there are dialects I think, but I don't know much about them or even which one I speak lol.

19. do you like your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem?

It's alright, I don't have strong feelings about it .

20. which sport is The Sport in your country?

Cricket. Enough said.

21. if you could send two things from your country into space, what would they be?

Ahhh, I don't know. Our food, maybe? Astronauts need food, right?

22. what makes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed?

People. For both. I will not elaborate ^-^

23. which alcoholic beverage is the favoured one in your country?

I don't drink alcohol. So, I don't know. Where I live, it's also kinda taboo to drink alcohol :(

24. what other nation is joked about most often in your country?

Brits and Americans, again enough said

25. would you like to come from another place, be born in another country?

No, I like it here.

26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal?

Don't really care.

27. favourite national celebrity?

I don't know any pop culture, national or international. So, can't say :/

28. does your country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites?

Yeah all three and lots of them, we are big as I said before. We are supposed have favourites?

29. does your region/city have a beef with another place in your country?

None that I know of

30. do you have people of different nationalities in your family?

Nope ^-^