But actually, there is an excellent option for the troops after the war (if there is a real after): peace keeping operations. This is good business, as evidenced by the rebellion of the Bangladesh Border Force who were not eligible to go. Of course, it is essential that the peace keepers should not rape the local women (we had a couple of incidents already).

assuming your case is proven while proceeding to other points is very Derbyshire and disappointing. I had hoped you possessed some sort of dataset to substantiate your stated claim about how the entire diaspora is carrying the flag.

thinking logically (while we still all have that capacity), does the flag-waving population of the protests we’ve all seen pictorialized over the years really constitute the entire diaspora population? a tenth? .0001%? We’ll never really know but there will still be individuals curiously confident enough in this lack of data to repeatedly trumpet the apparently unchanging character of every single diaspora member as “tiger flag bearing.”

arriving without money or family to lean on, most of us were too busy supporting families, paying off school loans and generally making it in the west. That you think everyone has such a bloody large amount of leisure time to devote to flag waving is puzzling unless you never had to do that yourself. When you don’t even have bootstraps by which to pull yourself up, your perspective and priorities can never match this ludicrous straw man characterization of the diaspora that you and so many others here inthe kottusphere seem to joyfully share in disseminating.

“One university lecturer, who agreed only to speak on the telephone, said: “The police are always asking us what we are doing here. Why we are in Colombo. We are scared. In public places we have to speak Sinhalese. If you speak Tamil in a bus or market, people will stare.”

This, of course, does not equate to support for the rebels’ violent tactics. But on a walk through Bambalapitiya, replete with Hindu temples and flower sellers, practically everyone who agreed to speak voiced some degree of sympathy for the LTTE.”

They just really need to put the LTTE flag down. That’s my only beef with them.

According to what I’ve been reading in the Kottusphere lately, Tamils in Colombo are a prosperous and entrepreneurial mob of John Galts, and have no reason to believe their standard of life, most notably civil liberties enjoyed, is any less than those of their Singhalese countrymen. Sri-Lanka is a different place than in 1983–move on!

What point is there is writing that Tamils in Colombo are afraid? This is a conclusion at which most deductive reasoners eventually arrive and most inductive reasoners can reach after data collection–unless of course they are too busy singing the praises of rent-seekers or grossly overstimating their ability to make positive change.

“The tamil diaspora” is often shouted out, in varying levels of villainous characterization, and there are individual data points which support such characterizations, but there will be pushback from actual members of that group.

i hope it will be courteous and civil in tone but aggressive in rolling back the philosophical models and faulty heuristics which underpin much ‘analysis’ of them by ‘patriots’ of the home country.

When my elderly aunt and uncle were detained for being aged diabetic and bipolar Tamils with pictures of 50′s era hunting expeditions on the mantelpiece, there was no one left in SL to call ‘friends’ in gov’t to secure their release. It was done 100% by diaspora relatives, 100s of calls to this or that machan/batchmate/oldchum, all for the release of 2 senior citizens. And after 24 hours, it finally worked. For that i’m greatful–not to the understanding superintendent–but to my diaspora relatives for accumulating enough human capital to save a family member.

I am a tamil who grew up in the Maldives. I was a kid when the PLOTE idiots attempted to capture the country and then all the tamil young males there who had been there for years were arrested.

NOT such a good idea :)

I know all about the difficulties of being a tamil in Colombo right now. My mother freaks out if I get a liitle bit late to get back from work and I am not allowed to stay out late at night – remember that when scheduling the next open mic will you :)

Seriously though, can’t these open mics be held a little earlier on some public holidays or something?