Tamilness more of a collective? It's a lot of people, it's family, and when I think of like a Western identity it's individual self actualization  make the children study hard, hope everyone is well, you all be well, send a letter, take good care of bavani, aunty how are you, (other woman): I want you to send (child interrupts)some chill powder, that is all, nothing else; (child) I want a pottu;  you can't have a good story without characters with depth, your characters are going to decide how your story is going to move forward. But it's just how the pieces all line up and you get to that point and then they all collide right?   like that's how you show different sides of yourself, to different people in your life and obviously not everyone knows like all sides of you with the pressure of integrating into society they like decided they couldn't tell us specific stories so now it's on the next generation to kind of solve those mysteries and so I guess that's the way I use archive as like a mystery solving tool, filling in some of those gaps like knowing that I wouldn't ever be able to, to understand, I was really interested in the full story, my family stories are always going to be in the back of my mind. They're also stories that are unfolding in real time.   When you're in like a close knit community where you're sharing food, videos, whatever like, think that felt more like how I imagine people who are, who grew up here feel. I am trying to understand like what it means for a person, for a Tamil person to be here. I think that was the first moment I realized, there are kids here, who never really, truly, lived there or they do not that moment I was thinking I'm not the same, diaspora. So I'm trying to understand like what it means for a person a Tamil person to be here, to be amongst other Tamil people who are desperately seeking some kind of connection with home and homeland, and ultimately understanding autonomy as a Tamil person. what aspects of society do I want to participate in? Like I don't want to participate in a Tamil community that's constantly policing oh I'm grieving. You think that it's your duty to take on the pain of all your ancestors, unlike your family and you have to suffer, exactly what your family suffered through because it's like your responsibility and like they did it for you, so now you have to do for them and like. We're also allowed to have like a good life. That's not full of suffering.

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