This only furthers OPs argument ?

Tbh I have a very hard time noticing the subtle differences in the pan south Asian look.

But I 100% believe people with a more trained eye can tell. I posted my pics on another thread here…

https://www.brownpundits.com/2020/05/15/the-memes-reflected-in-our-genes/

People were able to correctly tell where my ancestry is from.

“ I see the distinction is like Paris students vs Rome Students vs Belgrade students etc and not like Paris students vs Beirut students vs Ashgabat students”

This is a good analogy.

No i don’t know y u thought i was trolling on that one. There are host of tam brahms in entertainment industry. Hardly anyone stands out as a S-Indian. Ditto for my tam brahm friends. They speak hindi fluently somehow as well. Again its a generalization, and guess work.

“1) Iyers will name their kids after Shiva , Durga , Karthikeya , Ganesh AND also Vishnu and Lakshmi
2) Iyengars will only name their kids after Vishnu or Lakshmi , some Iyers will also name their kids after Vishnu and Lakshmi”
– Agree on all the other points of differences you listed except the naming bit, since there are more exceptions to your rule than agreements when I look at my own extended family, even going back generations.

“I was mainly talking about distinguishing Tam-Brahms from non-Brahmins purely based on facial features.”
– Best of luck with that, mate. There’s no rule of thumb as far as I can tell. You might get a few hits using a gross generalisation like the one below but it’ll be statistically insignificant and dwarfed massively by the number of false positives.

“Someone who looks bit out of place in Tamil Nadu like fairer skin or “sharper features” than the rest, but still speaks tamil. Tam Brahms in N-India fit right in, while u can make out other castes”
– LOL. I know you often troll mate, so can’t tell if this is in jest or not.
And what’s ‘N-India’? In my mind it covers the area N of the Vindhyas including Gujarat, Kashmir, Bihar, etc. Are you generalising the people from all of these areas into one category? If I were from one of these regions I might have even taken umbrage at that

I know people swear by genetics on this blog, but I think the impact of genetics is massively overestimated on the ground. The idea that a group like say the Brahmins of a region who would have lived there for many, many generations will be so divergent from their neighbours to the point of being able to tell them apart with statistical sureness is to my mind laughable and incongruous with ground realities.

“So more Hritik Roshan rather than Ajay Devgan (even though both are punjabi)”
Hrithik is 1/4 Bengali IIRC.

“The pan-Indian look is sort of unremarkable, because it doesn’t stand out too much.”
It’s obvious every region has its own share of distinct looks, yet there are certain common traits that make them look somewhat related.
I’d like to compare students from different regions.

Comilla(Bangladesh) Students:
http://britannia.edu.bd/admin/img/slider/d178ad1b6b.jpg

Patna(Bihar) Students:
https://i0.wp.com/www.socialnews.xyz/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/07/ea7878cf7ac0b33b23178b5ea10a8267.jpg?fit=2000%2C1333&quality=90&zoom=1&ssl=1

Ahmedabad(Gujarat) Students:
https://ahduni.edu.in/assets/images/academics/academics-img3.jpg

Visakhapatnam(AP) students:
https://www.gitam.edu/departments_cms/assets/uploads/slider/1552035568_slider.jpg

I see the distinction is like Paris students vs Rome Students vs Belgrade students etc and not like Paris students vs Beirut students vs Ashgabat students.

@Sumit, Shiv Nadar is a Dravidian , and Vishwanathan Anand is a Tam-Brahm, so no surprise they look very different

Yea personally when I think North Indian looking I am thinking more North West type look.

So more Hritik Roshan rather than Ajay Devgan (even though both are punjabi)

Similarly for South Indian look I think of more extreme examples like Shiv Nadar, rather than Vishwanathan Anand. (Both are Tamil)

The pan-Indian look is sort of unremarkable, because it doesn’t stand out too much.

australian aborigines and AASI diverged ~40,000 years ago. so they are different