Talk:Tamils/Archive 1

Can we delete the section on "racial slurs against tamil people" ? One "slur" just amounts to the indian version of the "N"-word and the other "slur" seems to be borrowed from the 16th century as far as I am concerned. --128.12.188.108

Personally I don't find any reason to delete them as the usage is still much common around India. --Rrjanbiah 04:41, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Ethinic Problems

The section on "ethnic problems" has a single introductory sentence. "Tamilians faced many ethinic problems." In my opinion, that sentence isn't needed, since it merely restates the header. Besides this, the sentence has a spelling error, it's incorrectly in the past tense, and it's phrased in a misleading way, IMHO. So I removed it. Not a big deal.

Rrjanbiah, you then reverted this change, calling it "vandalism". Please do not call other users' edits "vandalism" just because you disagree. Reverting things in this way, without discussion, is a good way to start edit wars, which are bad for Wikipedia. I'm going to remove the sentence for the reasons stated above. If you disagree, please say why here instead of reverting. Quadell (talk) 15:25, Aug 18, 2004 (UTC)

Why don't you follow your own advice?? You have removed the sentence with weird edit summary... --Rrjanbiah 05:58, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Fame-free culture

I think some information like author of literary works has been lost with time. In fact for works like Tholkaapiyam, even the exact period of this work is not known. The lack of information doesnt ascribe to "fame-free culture". I think the paragraph and its title needs to be rephrased. Sanjeeth

Actully, it is the fame-free culture. Wouldn't it be inappropriate to say, we could get hundreds of poems but lost only the titles and poet names?

There is one poem regarding etiquette or talking ill about such fame oriented practice or something like that. Sorry, it is very long time since I have been pulled out myself from literature activities and so I couldn't recollect exact poem. But, I'm sure I have attended workshops on how ancient books were named and etc, and so I'm much sure it is fame-free system.

Regarding your remark about Tholkaapiyam: it is the pro-Sanskrit people who are making noise because of classical language issues.

--Rrjanbiah 06:56, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

We still have hundreds of creations whose authors are known. Only in a few instances have we lost the author's information. Even going by your theory of frame free culture, it does mean that only a few like the authors of Thirukkural or Tholkaapiyam ascribed to it. Hence it shouldnt find a place under the topic of Tamil People.

-Sanjeeth

As the paragraph says it is about _ancient_ Tamil poets such as Sekkilaar, Ovvaiyaar, Kaalamega pulavar, Thiruvalluvar, Tolkappiyar...(None of the poets before and at Sangam period add their names and title). Obviously as you said, we are not talking about Vaali, Vairamuthu, Jeyakanthan, Sujatha or any other such people. --Rrjanbiah 10:38, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Gender bias in pictures?

I like the idea of putting a gallery of famous Tamils along the side of the page... But are all noteworthy Tamils men? (I notice there's a serviceable picture at M.S. Subbulakshmi.) And what about J. Jayalalithaa after all? QuartierLatin1968 20:27, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I completely agree. But the problem is much deeper than that. In my view this whole article is in a mess now. The structure of the article (that of mentioning individuals) is inherently subjective and hence POV. I would recommend a complete rewrite/deletion/rename and rewrite as Tamil society. -- Sundar 07:02, Feb 24, 2005 (UTC)

J. Jayalalithaa is not Tamil. M.S. Subbulakshmi is not popular. Perhaps it may be POV. --Rrjanbiah 18:34, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Regarding recent edits

I might be biased. But, I have few points to make about the recent edits.

In this article, I have added some/many sections sometimes ago, but didn't/couldn't improve it.

When I added the images, my idea is to give the quick overview about "Who are Tamilians" and "How the Tamilians will look", etc to the *foreigners*. That's why I added the images of *very well known* people. I could have added Velupillai Prabhakaran, but didn't have his image. But, the recent edit seems to deteriorate that. There is also a separate page to list the famous/all Tamilians.

Also, I don't agree with the characteristics that was listed in *core culture* section. I'm yet to come across such characterisation of ancient Tamilians. It is hard to accept that Tamilians were "sectarians" and or "success/fame oriented".

These are the reasons for my commenting out of the texts. If you have any good reasons, feel free to revert or improve. --Rrjanbiah 19:27, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Kabaddi

Can somebody provide a link to the claim that it has been included in the Olympics? AFAIK its only been included in the Asian Games. -- Sanjeeth 10:20, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Me too. -- Sundar 11:07, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)