Talk:Shankar (Tamil militant)

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He was a right hand man of Tamil Tigers supremo Prabhakaran. He was the commander of the Air Force which had a few light aircraft. He graduated from IIT Chennai in Aeronautical Engineering. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.105.124.251 (talk • contribs) 01:54, 3 January 2007

Cite sources

Come on guys, this is Wikipedia policy. Cite your sources when you make edits; that is doubly true here given he is a controversial figure. This is not the place for speculation or ethnic POV pushing. I've put all the unsourced content below. When you find sources, then you can put it back in the article. Also, if he wanted to be a heart surgeon, why did he study aeronautical engineering at IIT Chennai (another unsourced statement)? Regards, cab 22:29, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

His father Vaithilingam was a public servant - an irrigation supervisor.

He wanted become a heart surgeon in the lines of Christian Barnard (like his elder brother who is a practising surgeon in London) and he was not successful as the admissions of the Tamils were limited by the controversial standardization process introduced by I.M.R.A. Iriyagolle, the Education Minister. He joined the resistance movement at an early age of 16 years; but he was not an active member as the movement was incipient at that time and started gathering momentum as successive Sinhalese governments introduced the worst kind of discrimination against the Tamil students on a permanent basis.: During his school days he was a Maoist communist party sympathizer and kept his admiration for China and Mao for a longtime till he joined the liberation struggle. The eventual LTTE rule is more of a Rama Raj with a crime free lasse faire style than a communist dictatorship. People liked the rule as efficient and effective delivery of services when compared with the corruption ridden Colombo rule.

As admissions into the Sri lankan Universities were limited to Tamils, he went onto India and got admitted to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and pursued his childhood dream of becoming a pilot. He excelled in IIT Chennai, where he studied aeronautical engineering. His knowledge of Chennai as a city helped in his latter part of life as he could gather and focus all his available friends for the freedom cause.

For a while he worked in the foreign ships as a radio officer and came back to Jaffna where he met his longtime friend and relative Prabhakaran and planned his vision for the future of Tamils and their permanent protection.

Later he became one of the permanent bodyguard of Prabhakaran.

Freethought

Thanks California Alibaba for your interest in Sornalingam. You edited the article. That is well done. But one thing for your observation here:

Not everything is available as Internet. His lifehistory is mostly available in Sri Lanka Government funded publications and LTTE sponsored publications. That is mostly after his age of 30. whatever he has doine before is known by private communications and living with him as a friend. Many friends he had during his school life and public life will vouchsafe for his biography. Most of them are professors in US universities and millionaire businessman in world's leading cities. As such you may let the material stay there rather than cull it and prune it down to delete it without any life or substance.

As a Tamil he was discriminated by the Sri Lankan Government in GCE Advanced Level by statistically standardizing the marks and failing him. At the same time he is from a middle class family who has to pay for admission in a foreign university to study in an engineering course. Medical College admissions in India are limited to Indian citizens. He was fortunate enough to get into IIT as that is the next possible alternative. IIT had a quota for foreign students with Tamil/Indian Hindu background. There is no secret about this. The quota still exists.

But I do not think such a quota exists for medical college admissions (unless otherwise you bribe some Indian politicians at that time). --Nina Leembruggen 09:13, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. And thanks also for the information about medical school admissions in India; happy to learn something new. But I think this shows that something which may be general knowledge to you, who is familiar with the local situation, is not general knowledge to editors in other parts of the world; it's precisely this kind of information that should have sources, so that people who are interested can read more about it. I'm not asking that all sources be available on the internet; just that when editors edit the article, they indicate where they are getting the information from, even if it's from offline books or print newspapers. Just put a <ref>Name of source</ref> into the text after each sentence or paragraph, so that other editors who have access to the same sources can check the facts. There doesn't need to be a web link. The problem is, if many people just put in information without saying where they got it from, it's hard to tell what is just an opinion and what is published fact; then it's very easy for the article to degenerate into an edit war as some people want to emphasise some facts and other people want to emphasise other facts. Cheers, cab 06:32, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Freethought:

It is good that a neutral person like you is involved in writing this article. I can feel how things can become a egoistic battle with several authors wanting their versions published. there are several sides to a biography. If anybody disagrees they may have to add another section as criticism. This can be seen with several biographies like Gandhi, Karunanidhi, Jeyalalithaa and Periyar. Now Sornalingam is a historical personality like one of them. If you are in USA you will have no access to the vast amount of material published by the Government and LTTE. What is happening is now 20th/21st Century History. I am the personal communication for some of the incidents and stories. As these facts have to be documented somewhere so that history does not forget this. This is now major part of South Asian history as several countries are involved in "the War and Peace".

--Nina Leembruggen 09:13, 8 January 2007 (UTC)