Firstly, let me thank malaysiakini , on behalf of those of us who are now talking freely about the future of Tamil schools in Malaysia in this forum.

Such a debate can now be held cordially, thanks to malaysiakini , without the fear of flying chairs landing on one's head, as would be the case had this debate been undertaken in some community hall or political party sponsored forum!

I also thank Ryan for his support, and the others for their valuable contribution.

I, like the rest of you, have great love and respect for the Tamil language, its history, culture and literature and have always been amazed at how an ancient language like Tamil has a Tamil terminology for everything without having to borrow words from anywhere or any other language.

Please don't misunderstand my earlier letter .

What we are missing here is the fact that the bulk of Tamil school-educated children in this country - in comparison to those who come from national schools - do not fare well at secondary or tertiary level. This is a statistical fact.

How then are we going to uplift the lot of Tamil educated pupils, if after fifty years, we are still in the same lousy state of affairs?

All I am saying is that a Tamil education in Malaysia in this age and time is causing a lot of Tamil- speaking Indians lose out in the long run and thus, the community on the whole suffers.

In my opinion, it is far better to be an economically and educationally superior community than to be a community which brags about an ancient culture and civilisation but with half its population doing manual labour or getting drunk.

This - no matter how sad - is the situation. And the only thing that is going to get the community out of this sad situation is a good solid education.

This is only possible if our Tamil politicians put their selfish desire for self-preservation aside and honestly tell the Tamil masses that: 'In their present state, our Tamil schools are not doing justice to our children, otherwise we ourselves would be sending our children to these schools'.

Show me one politician who has done this and I will show you a hundred who have done the opposite.

Just look and learn from the Jaffna Tamils in this country. Their mother tongue is also Tamil but they are far ahead of the Indian Tamils because they place far more importance on a good solid education without being hung up on emotional attachments to a mother tongue that is not going to feed their family or themselves in this country in this era.

Chelva Kpyllai is indeed fortunate to be in New Zealand after going to a Tamil school in this country.

Please, tell me in which Tamil school in Malaysia do your children study in?