Dear Jeyamohan
The video on Tamil culture in the USA provides a direct and poignant discussion point. In the USA, parents are deeply concerned about the cultural identity of their children.They hold a double standard on this issue. They want their children to be very successful Americans from a social and economic point of view. Simultaneously, they long for their children to have a strong Indian identity in their personal and emotional lives. They are uncertain about how their children can attain this dual identity within the confines of traditional American education.
They send their children to elite American educational institutions; their true aspiration is solely to achieve financial success. If you ask them, they will undoubtedly prioritize achieving financial success. Their anxiety about cultural identity is actually a simple pretension. They enroll their children in a Tamil school at a young age and then discontinue their attendance to focus on their education. They even refrain from speaking to their children in Tamil. But they used to lament that their children were not speaking or reading Tamil.
If their cultural anxiety is genuine, they should encourage their children to read Tamil literature and cultural studies in English. I don’t think many of them will do this.
Krishnachandar
