எனது முதல் தமிழ் படைப்பு (My first Tamil work)
First Tamil-language piece on this blog. Putting it up properly — the writing, the small image I drew for it, and a note on why Tamil is the right language for the things I most want to say.
This is the first Tamil-language piece I’m posting here. The blog has been mostly English so far — college projects, trip notes, the occasional movie review — but Tamil is where I actually think about the things that matter most, and it has been a quiet itch to start putting some of that here too.
Today is the day.
The image is a small composition I sketched a few months ago and uploaded to the Joomla gallery on this site (it lived under kavidhaigal_9 — kavidhaigal, கவிதைகள், meaning poems). Reusing it here because it captures the mood the piece is reaching for and because the act of putting both the writing and the image in the same post is the small ritual that signals “this is real, I’m publishing it, not just keeping it in a notebook.”
why a separate Tamil track
A reasonable question. The blog has an audience — small but real — that reads English. Switching to Tamil narrows the reachable readership for any given post by an order of magnitude.
Three reasons it’s still the right call:
One: the words exist in Tamil. There are categories of feeling I keep trying to describe in English and keep losing the precise grain of. Aanmai. Bhakti. Veedu meaning home but also liberation. Thanimai not flattening into loneliness. The English mappings are always a step too far away from what I meant.
Two: I want the practice. Writing in your second language stays sharp because it has to. Writing in your first language gets sloppy if you stop. Tamil is my first language, and the only way to keep it sharp is to write in it for an audience — even a small one.
Three: the internet needs more Tamil literary content. The web has been overwhelmingly English for a decade and a half, and the regional-language web is still mostly news sites and movie reviews. Original literary writing in Tamil online — even amateur, even very-small-audience — is a public good. Wikipedia in Tamil has fewer articles than Wikipedia in Esperanto. We can do better, one post at a time.
the format I’m settling on
Short. Image. Title in Tamil with a parenthesised English gloss for the search engines (and for friends who read the blog but don’t read Tamil). One or two paragraphs of context in English so the non-Tamil reader gets the shape of the piece even if the lines themselves are out of reach.
I’ll batch follow-ups when I have more than one ready. Aiming for one or two a month, depending on how the writing goes. If you read Tamil and want to send feedback — corrections, suggested readings, “you should look at this poet” — please do. The comments are open and the email box is open. I read both.
— Karthik