👨‍🏫 About Me

My background 🧏🏼‍♂️🦻🏼

I am a Deaf Danish-Tamil with Danish Sign Language as my first language. I came to Denmark from Sri Lanka at the age of 9, fleeing the civil war in 1986, and grew up in Viborg with my family and at a Deaf residential school in Aalborg.

It was not until I started learning Danish Sign Language at around age 10 to 11 that I had my mother tongue. That late language acquisition shaped me profoundly, both as a person and as an educator. I know firsthand what it means to learn differently, to need more time, and to navigate systems that were not built with you in mind.

That experience is at the core of my work in e-learning and accessibility.

Today I live in Aarhus and work to make education more accessible, particularly for Deaf and signing communities in Denmark, India, and internationally.

I trained as an educator and educational consultant after graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Educational Science from Aarhus University in 2025.

Philosophy, books, and film

On long walks, I often philosophise about the world's big questions: where consciousness comes from, who creates life on earth, whether God is a mathematical designer, and whether other life forms exist on other planets.

But it is not only philosophy. I also reflect on my own life: family, finances, health, friendship, food culture, different cultures, geopolitics, and travel.

I read books on learning theorists such as Jean Piaget (cognitive developmental stages) and Lev Vygotsky (the zone of proximal development), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory, and Knud Illeris' learning triangle, along with Stoicism (full control over your own reactions, attitudes, and choices), Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, Martin Heidegger's Gestell or enframing of modern technology, Aristotle's theory of ethics, love, and friendship (philia), Rene Descartes (Cogito, ergo sum), and many more.

I spend most of my time in Microsoft OneNote, which gathers knowledge from books and literature websites.

Free digital books and magazines are available through the Danish public libraries' online portal, eReolen Global.

I watch a lot of documentaries, and afterward, I can't stop analyzing them: how the story is structured, what choices were made, and what could have been done differently. I bring that same curiosity into my work with schools, organisations, and independent projects.

Building, teaching, sharing

Alongside consulting and teaching, I build and maintain a small ecosystem of open, self-hosted projects. Among them: Tamilworld.org, a trilingual encyclopedia of Tamil culture and diaspora. Signevents.net, an event map for community gatherings.

I prefer self-hosted, open-source tools over closed platforms. Not out of dogma, but because owning the infrastructure means I can guarantee privacy, accessibility, and longevity for the people who depend on these sites.

My spare time

In my spare time I work in filming and web development, watch films on streaming services such as Netflix and other streaming services, and read news on the web.

On this blog I write about daily life, research, and knowledge.

Entertainment

I keep track of the films and shows I watch through IMDb. See what I've watched on IMDb.

Interests and activities

• Learning new computer technologies
• Designing websites
• Editing videos
• Travelling

So far I've travelled to USA, England, France, Switzerland, Slovakia, India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and more.

My travel map

Let's talk

kumaran@kumarathurai.eu