Watch the maiden video in this story
Venkat Raman
Auckland, October 24, 2019
A team of six youngsters is promoting New Zealand and its pristine beauty as a mission, focusing initially on the Tamil Diaspora worldwide.
Dineshkumar Ravi, an employee in a Hamilton based engineering firm, has created a music video that captures in part the natural splendour of New Zealand, explaining why Tamilians consider it as their second home.
About the New Venture
Called, ‘Miles with D,’ the video runs in Tamil with English subtitles.
A TV anchor and producer, Dineshkumar hosted several television shows for a popular Tamil Channel for more than five years before migrating to New Zealand in 2017.
“I would like to pursue my passion (for visual production and creativity) in New Zealand differently and usefully,” he said.
Stating that the bounty of Nature in New Zealand was always a source of inspiration, Dineshkumar said the vision of ‘Miles with D’ is to showcase not only the beautiful locations and Nature’s bounty but also the culture, cuisine, traditional values and adventurous ventures that the country offers.
“I would like to reach global audience by publishing as YouTube VLOG videos and other social media platforms. We are a team of six likeminded people. To begin our journey, we made our first original music video which explains the beauty of New Zealand and how the Tamil community considers New Zealand as their second Home,” he said.
A collaboration with ‘Moksha Base,’ a team of talented people with a passion for music and a penchant to provide unique experience to people, the maiden video includes the works of Dineshkumar (Lyrics and Direction), Shankar Narayanan (Drone, Editing and Music), and Siva Kumar (Rap and Creative Crew of Moksha Base).
Among the other members of the sextet are Praneema Krishnakumar, Nivetha Thiruppathi and Balachander Lakshmanan.
“Our Channel will focus on making travel videos which will help tourists, students, adventurous people and new immigrants. These videos will also help to know cultures followed by different communities in New Zealand,” Dineshkumar said.
About the Tamil Diaspora
Writing in Indian Newslink seven years ago, the late V Sivasupramaniam said that the dispersal of Tamils around the globe is not of recent origin.
“There are more than 70 million of them residing in 50 countries, rich in heritage, culture, language and literature. In many cases, their unity was consolidated by struggle, suffering and aspiration for a brighter future for their successive generations,” he said.
According to Father Henry Heras, a famous Indian historian of Spanish origin, “Tamil is the oldest of the present languages.”
As a powerful Dravidian language, Tamil is perhaps the only example of an ancient language which has survived as a spoken language for more than 3500 years with its basic structure almost unchanged.
The name ‘Tamil’ is itself unique, meaning ‘sweetness’ and ‘coolness.’
Language and culture are two facets of the same identity and a major cultural element. Culture is everything that is socially learned and shared by members of a society; it is an organised system of behaviour and said to be normative because it defines standards of conduct.
People’s struggle
According to Edward Burnett Tylor, an Anthropologist, “It is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, customs and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of a society.”
Isolated diaspora communities often preserve their cultural heritage much more than their brethren in their homeland.
Each Tamil Diaspora community had to wage its own unique struggle over generations to achieve economic prosperity without losing its identity and traditions. Each has its own stories of how they overcame obstacles peculiar to its adopted homeland.
Despite their relative isolation from their homeland, they have preserved and nurtured Hindu religious traditions such as Kavadi and other cultural elements to posterity.
The digital revolution is not only accelerating the process of globalisation but also strengthening the bonds of the diaspora forging a new cultural, economic and political togetherness of a people and deep rooted kinship ties and finding fresh avenues for expression.
(Pictures Supplied)
