Assamese

Instead of one script, they applied for an IDN-CCT-LD in each of their local scripts.

.jad and Devanagari approved 2011, live August 2014. then Tamil, Telugu, Gramukhi, Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, plus Assamese, Kashmiri, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi variants in 2022.

That's 1415 scripts! The .in registry created an expert IDN working group in May 2005 to cover 22 official languages.

Ram Mohan from Afilius led the technical implementation.

Subin Garg passed away in 2025 at the age of 52 due to an accidental drowning while swimming in Singapore.

He was a famous singer and composer who helped to shape the modern landscape of Assamese and Bollywood playback music.

DJ Twitch passed away in 2025 at the age of 57 from an untreatable brain tumor.

His real name, by the way, Keith MacGyver.

So, uh, Dihing, Dikhow, Lohit, and, uh, I'm forgetting what the name of the fourth one was.

These are all-- Lohit is the Assamese name for Brahmaputra.

Shame on you for forgetting.

[chuckles] Yeah.

He was now nearly sixteen, tall for his age, and active, but, owing to the hot climate and the absence of vigorous exercise, he was less broad and muscular than most English lads of his age.

They found on landing that news had arrived two days before that a powerful army of Burmese had entered Kachhar from Manipur and had defeated the troops of Jambir Singh, that four thousand Burmese and Assamese had advanced from Assam into Kachhar and had begun to stockade themselves at Bikrampur at the foot of the Borotka Pass, and that the third division was crossing into the district of Jintik immediately to the north of Sylhet.

There was a complete panic in the town, and the riots were flocking in from all the surrounding country with their families and belongings and were making their way down the country in boats to Dhaka.

I'm afraid, Stanley, that there's an end to trade at present.

I fancy we shall find them more formidable here if they come, Captain Noton said.

Bandua has a great reputation and is immensely popular with them.

From what you say, a considerable proportion of the fellows you met up there were Assamese levies raised by the Burmese.

I grant that the Burmese themselves do not seem to have done much better, but they would never have conquered all the peoples they have come across and built up a great empire if there had not been good fighting stuff in them.

We want to see your bride.

And then this absolutely gorgeous, stunning Assamese woman.

I clocked her as Assamese the second I saw her.

Sorry.

I was like that beige Muga silk.

She's Assamese.

And there's a lot of intermarrying that happens between Bengalis and Northeasterners.

Right.

And in a previous song, we really came up with this idea that Amrita would sing and I would do a kind of humming, which actually is, I didn't know this until you told me, but it's a kind of school of vocal performance in Assam, which is a northeastern state in India.

Assamese humming.

And we got into it in a previous song.

when she was singing lyrics, I can't even remember now which language you were in, but not English.

And I did the Assamese humming rather than trying to come in and harmonize in Bengali, I guess.

But this time...

We wanted to have harmonies, but Amrita sang in English and I did the humming over an English line and it just sounded great.

For about six months, I interviewed every family in the village, 107 families, antecedents, this, that.

But the stories that started coming to me at that point of time, travels of migration, generational movements, tea labor, people brought from various states put in indentured labor, Assamese nationalism, which has been... on the cards since 30, 40, 50 years, in fact, post-independence, all of this started colliding, along with my own personal history, my family history of my father leaving Dhaka in 1942 as the pre-partition riots start.

And my father passed around that same time as I was there in Assam.

So all of these stories started colliding.

So it was terrifying facing his swing bowling.

So I modeled that bit of Rizu on this particular boy, whom I met after the book came out about 30 years later.

But other parts came from other young Assamese boys I knew, nationalists, separatists, people who fought with the Alpha, the separatist army.

So various characters modelled in.

How many business people in the world can say that? I have the privilege of saying that, that I stand here representing, this week we're celebrating Tamil Nadu.

You see, Assamese in Nagaland and everything, and to bring all this together under one roof.

I'm not singular at all in my approach to India.

From religion to faith to cuisine, I am everything.

I saw Othello Black and White by Roy Stone Abel.

Although it is an English play, but the character of Adil Hussain was Assamese.

The character of Othello.

He was saying Assamese.

So I like that play a lot.

And apart from that, I saw a play in Bangla, which I saw in Delhi.