Advocate Duraisamy Naidoo (55) living in the Fiji islands recites Tamil Therukoothu (street play) songs with no difficulty.

Several teachers in Singapore schools have got their pay increased after they got their masters degree in Tamil language. Naidoo and many Singapore teachers are beneficiaries of Tamil Virtual University (TUV) in Chennai.

Over 500 students pass out from the TUV every year who are passionate about Tamil language and a sizeable sum of teachers and other professionals who learn Tamil to improve their living standards abroad.

Pointing out that Tamil language has given new lives to many abroad, TVU director P.R. Nakkeeran said, “We have got feedback from many of our students in Singapore that the school managements there increase their salaries after they complete master degree course in our university.

Tamil language is given due respect in schools in USA where students are allowed to take Tamil as their third language.”

The director said that TUV offers both school and college education online for a moderate fee. “Several Tamil families, who have settled down in foreign countries register with our university to teach Tamil for their children.

We have a good collection of basic lessons for Tamil language. Many experts and Tamil enthusiastic have developed the manuals with care,” he said.

Based on the requests from the applicants in South Africa, the university has prepared Tamil lessons in French language. “Earlier we taught Tamil through British English.

But now students prefer learning through French. We have added four sets of syllabus in French language. We will upload the entire school syllabus shortly,” said Mr Nakkeeran.

The university has more than 50 centres in 17 countries and often updates e-library, which has the current collection of 2,000 books. To know more details about TUV contact: 044-22201012

students launch social networking site for like-minded people

When Gokul Nath Sridhar, third year Civil Engineering and Biological Sciences student of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, was browsing his Facebook friend list he found that he hated half the people in it.

It made him think that there should be a social network that connects like-minded people across the globe. He worked on the idea for nearly nine months and came up with ‘INU’.

“I hired three of my juniors from college. Though two juniors left after sometime, Mrudula Balachander stayed with INU and is the chief technical officer,” said Gokul who is the founder and CEO of the social networking site INU.

Another student Sembiyan Anbarasu of National University of Singapore too joined INU after seeing the Facebook page the team created about INU.

“I was so attracted with the concept as it helps one make new friends based on his/her likes and dislikes,” said Sembiyan, who is the chief marketing analyst of the social networking site.

While a majority of social networking sites focus on getting positive feedback, this site has an option where people can give negative feedback as well. In order to organise the interests alone, INU uses Twitter-style hash tags.

“To organise the interests and also help people prioritize, most commonly spoken topics have been put under categories such as arts and literature, movies and music and people and places,” explained Sembiyan.

While Gokul worked for over a year and a half for the development of the concept,
Mrudula had put in about eight months of effort. “Sometimes my single code session spans over 20 hours at a stretch. Our main focus is on improving the user experience on the site,” said Mrudula.

Launched on June 24, the INU has over 3,000 members and the three-member team is confident of having a million users before INU turns one.

Log on to www.theinu.com to connect with like-minded people.