So I met my first Sri Lankan here, in the metro. His first question - "where are you from?"; the second - "are you Sinhalese or Tamil". Half the world away, far away from all the discomforts of the war ridden poor country, it is still important to us to know how different we are from each other! And in reality, most people can't tell a Sri Lankan from an Indian. This reminds me of the nice saying in the 'Race' exhibition at our Science Museum in St. Paul "people try in so many ways to categorize each other into different groups, forgetting how much we have in common"!
To his credit, this Sri Lankan I met, seemed one of those moderate ones; he was Tamil, but talked to me in Sinahalese, when he could have opted to talk in English, very well! Is it sad that the second question a moderate Sri Lankan asks is in the direction of segregation?
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