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So when I started making friends with those who spoke Tamil, I started nudging them to teach me”.įor Aparna, her friends and Tamil movies were the first teachers. “I did not want to limit myself to one group. “When I came to Chennai to pursue my under graduation, I observed that people in the class formed their own groups based on the languages they speak,” recalls Aparna, who moved to Chennai from Bihar 15 years back. While college introduced Tenzin to Tamil, for Aparna Gautam, a career growth specialist and life coach, her desire to make friends made her learn Tamil. “I sought help from my Tamil classmates,” adds Tenzin. With college kindling Tenzin’s interest, he took it upon himself to learn Tamil beyond the basics. “Also, foreign nationals at my college have to mandatorily undergo the ‘Basic Tamil’ course as part of our curriculum”. “When I came here two years ago, I found it difficult as the majority of the people converse in Tamil,” says Tenzin Norbu, a final year college student who came to the city from Tibet. Read more: What connects ‘Naina’ and ‘KD’? The unique Madras Bashai However, belying this notion, many students hailing from other states and neighbouring countries are attempting to learn the basics of Tamil. There is a common perception among many that migrants to a city tend to hang around with people from the same community or state and have limited interaction with locals as a result they make no efforts to learn the local language. Technology, in particular, has made learning Tamil relatively easy. The good news is that learning Tamil is not a daunting task. The recognition places Tamil alongside other global classical languages like Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek and Latin. For a language to be declared classical, it should meet three criteria: ancient origins, independent tradition and having a considerable body of ancient literature. Learning Tamil, therefore, not only helps avoid communication barriers during regular daily interactions, it also wins more friends. Tamil is one of the six “classical” Indian languages. But at the core of the city’s society and culture, the sentiment towards the Tamil language remains intense and deep-rooted. With the IT industry witnessing a boom, Chennai’s demographic landscape is rapidly changing due to large scale migration of employees from other states and countries, giving the city a cosmopolitan character. An online Tamil learning class conducted by Tamizh Mozhi Koodam.