Pyat wanders - another day in photos

[pyat]

Lovely weather today, so commanderteddog and I went wandering. She works a couple of blocks from my office, so such peregrinations are often convenient. When we met, there was some kind of event brewing along Yonge Street. This turned out to be a Tamil Tiger protest against the Sri Lankan government.


I know practically nothing about this conflict, other than it's the sort of long-term and deeply entrenched argument that sends most people fleeing for the comparatively simple moral conumdrums of the occupation of Palestine. The Wiki entry seems to paint the Tigers in a pretty dire light. The protest was well-organized, though. The line of people extended more than a kilometer along the street, yet blocked no traffic or storefronts. I wish I'd brought the good camera, instead of just my cell phone, as I could've gotten some impressive photos.


We ducked into the Dundas Square, where I bought a keydrive and some food, then jogged over to the Ryerson Campus where we ate at the same picnic table on which I used to eat take-out fries and study Microeconomics in 1994.




On the way back, we wondered about the upside down ziggurat building near Ryerson.


And noted that the Toronto Police Mounted Units were hiding out in a side street off Yonge, no doubt waiting for the demonstration to turn ugly.

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

(scratches head)

I thought that the Canadian Govt designated the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organization (the repeated in the Wikipedia link inside the article you linked to) back in 2006.

So...how can they make a public protest, peaceful or otherwise?

Digging a little more, I found this news-story about the protest:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/03/16/tamil-protest.html

...and while it explains that the protest was from the Toronto ex-pat Tamil community decrying the recent violence in the region it still doesn't say why the Tamil Tigers are being supported in public by a Toronto community.

::B::

[pyat.livejournal.com]

...it still doesn't say why the Tamil Tigers are being supported in public by a Toronto community.

Partly, they were protesting being identified as terrorists in the first place. Also, it is perfectly possible for a terrorist group to have an understandable grievance. I may not like the IRA, or the PLO, but I certainly recognize that those organizations have legitimate complaints.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

The conflict is essentially over ethnic identity. The Tamils are a regional minority in Sri Lanka which is to say that they are an ethnically and linguistically distinct community that's historically indigenous to a specific region. In India, Tamil speakers are the majority of a very large state in the south of the country. So India makes Tamil one of its many official languages. The Sri Lanka government didn't take this route and forbade the teaching of the language in school as a way of suppressing political activities or a large segment of its population. Nothing that a lot of other governments have not done without as significant consequences. However, Tamils view their language as something given from God. Heck, we've run into a lot of criticism at Penn for daring to publish a standard dictionary of spoken Tamil verbs. Literary Tamil has an accepted standard. The spoken less so, very much less so. Anyway, this linguistic oppression is only the edge of the problem that I'm familiar with due to my work. But, anyway, the conflict is all about the identity of the people involved and their right to form one. This has been an ugly conflict for a long time. For a while, the Sri Lankan government was the primary bad actor, then the Tamil Tigers went bad. The government got a little better and the Tigers got a lot worse and now there's so much hate and distrust that this will be a low level guerilla conflict even if the government wins a strategic victory.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

The history here is really hard for anyone who was born in North America to understand. I studiously steered clear of politics and particulars of this one because I had to talk to both the Tamil speakers at work and the rest of the South Asians we had there at the time. There were a lot of mine fields laying around and all I could sense was that someone had the decency to state there was a cultural minefield, but no one could tells us where the field itself actually was much less where the individual mines were. I recently had to write a forward to a dictionary of Tamil and the length of the language's literary tradition really took me aback. In the west we barely know our works of antiquity. In South Asia, they are perpetually part of the current curriculum both in the school and in the modern culture. The last part of that is important. We may study our classics in school, but they tend not figure in our lives.

[brand-of-amber.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

Its like how a lot of Americans (and Canadians) aren't really sure without some prompting why the year 1492 is important, but I've known damn few Persian speakers who don't know instantly why the year 636 is important.

(And hell, you and I may have a classical education, but I don't think most folk these days could tell the Odyssey from the Aeneid if you beat them with it.)

[brand-of-amber.livejournal.com]

So, I'm hesitant to talk a lot about Sri Lanka and the Tigers on the net, as there's a lot of information to convey, and a lot of it is both subtle and political... and that never goes well on the net.

What I will say is this: in Sri Lanka there has been a 25 year long civil war that is based on a series of invasions and ethnic conflicts that started 1000 years ago, fanned up and down, were used and exploited by the British, and now have turned into a series of blood feuds and vendettas in which no one can hope to have clean hands.

If one is reminded of the way American and Canadian Irish supported the IRA for centuries, it probably isn't an accident.

So how are the Tigers protesting? They aren't, really, as far as I know. Tamils who don't think they're terrorists are protesting -- just like the Irish in Boston and New York used to do.

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

Hey Pyat, this is a bit offtopic, but still relevant since it involves downtown Toronto...

I've become a fan of the show "Flashpoint" on CBS. It has a LOT of principal photography in the Toronto area, especially in downtown. I'm just wondering if you've ever seen them filming.

One episode involved them trying to catch a sniper along the rooftops, and they had one of the public squares FILLED with SWAT-style vans and personnel milling about. I bet they do a lot of this on weekends though, so you'd probably miss it. :)

[brand-of-amber.livejournal.com]

I saw what I'm pretty sure was them filming down off Bay street a few months back. I didn't see any of the actors, but there were lots of semi-real looking SWAT guys and half the streets in the area closed off.

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it might have been that episode with the sniper.

Here's the opening shot of the area; most of the episode was filmed right around these two unusual looking buildings.

http://zorin.org/db/flashpoint-open.png

[brand-of-amber.livejournal.com]

That's City Hall, right where Bay meets Queen. So yea, it was exactly that area. (I used to live two blocks up from there, they film stuff in the area all the time.)

[kinra.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the ziggurat is Sears Canada HQ.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I believe you are right, sir!

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Yep.