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

[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.