My Name is Nihal I am 36 years old I am an Essex boy of Sri Lankan parentage I am a DJ on BBC Radio 1.
If you are Sri Lankan you are a minority within a minority you're not Indian, you're not Pakistani and you’re not Bangladeshi. All of which have huge populations compared to the Sri Lankan population.
The first time I really remember difference was I playing rugby for my secondary school. And we were playing this school in Essex another school in Essex and I mean half of this team were wrong’uns, I mean proper wrong’uns.
Just as they were getting to leave about five guys from that team came in and said we're looking for the Paki, where’s the Paki.
Just to do me in you know, just purely focused on hate — I have never had a chip on my shoulder and I am never going to because this country has given me things that no other country in the world could have given me.
But they are important things to kind of you know, know that these things happen.
My parents especially my father who was you know a committed kind of anglophile in many ways.
I think he tried to shield us from that by making us as English as possible purposefully perhaps not ramming home to us our Sri Lankaness.
That's something I discovered for myself and in some ways I think that is quite a good thing that it's real because I have gone out to search for it.
And make it happen for myself rather than having it imposed on me.
But in other ways it was a bad thing because I was naive enough to think I'm was just like you but clearly I wasn’t just like them.
So I had to learn to get on with a lot of different people, I had to in order to be sociable able when there is a barrier in some people’s minds, not many but some people's minds.
Because you look different to them, you had to be like kind of comedian like some people might find that a bit distasteful in some ways but I tell you something it has totally equipped me to deal with all the situations I find myself in.
I mean I have interviewed everyone from Snoop Dog to Benazir Bhutto and everyone in between that, It's interesting that you know it's not reading Mahatma Gandhi's' biography or wasn't the Southall riots it wasn’t something like that gave me the sense of kind of strength. It was actually the emergence of hip-hop culture.
I loved poetry and then I loved rhyming and I started to rap and then I discovered I could freestyle rhyme off the top of my head which meant that I could battle people who couldn't cos there are not a lot of people who could do that. I bonded with kind of one or two of the black kids in our school it was like do you want to join our crew?
It wasn't defined by language you spoke, the religion you were, didn't define it, the colour you were it was just about how good you were so suddenly I had this sense of belonging.
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