It seems like the Chrome browser in Ubuntu has some issues in displaying Tamil fonts. I guess, other Indian languages also might be having the same issue. The weirdest thing is Firefox was displaying the Tamil content properly.
So, after searching through the Chromium group for a while, found the fix for this issue.
To fix Tamil font in Ubuntu Chrome
- Open Terminal
- Go to the folder: cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont
- Delete FreeSerif.ttf: sudo rm FreeSerif.ttf
- Delete FreeSans.ttf: sudo rm FreeSans.ttf
- Close and re-open the browser.
The Tamil font should be displayed properly now.

Hi! I'm Veera Sundar. I am a web application developer. I usually build the application end-to-end using Java on the back-end and JavaScript on the front end. 
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Works great. But, you could have given ‘why’ and ‘what’!
Your posts are growing shorter day by day!
//Your posts are growing shorter day by day!//
Hmm. Agreed.
These days, I’m spending more time in learning the technologies that I need to work on my startup.
I have some idea to write a ‘lot’ about building a web application end to end. Hope that will be a lengthy series, then.
It worked well the day I did it. However, now everything seems to be messed up as usual. And my font directory is as below. Any ideas?
san@ubuntu:~$ cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont
san@ubuntu:/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont$ ll
total 4912
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2012-01-22 18:19 ./
drwxr-xr-x 17 root root 4096 2012-01-11 12:28 ../
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 169184 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeMonoBoldOblique.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 172860 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeMonoBold.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 207412 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeMonoOblique.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 343284 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeMono.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 189124 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeSansBoldOblique.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 205676 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeSansBold.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 329376 2011-05-01 01:55 FreeSansOblique.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 585252 2011-05-01 01:56 _FreeSans.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 284968 2011-05-01 01:55 FreeSerifBoldItalic.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 309212 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeSerifBold.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 443216 2011-05-01 01:56 FreeSerifItalic.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 1468768 2011-05-01 01:56 _FreeSerif.ttf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 284964 2011-05-01 01:56 Untitled1.ttf
Sometimes, during the auto updates, the font’s folders too gets updated with the Freesans and FreeSerif fonts. So in that case you need to go there and again delete those two fonts.
Also, I tried to just rename the fonts instead of deleting them but it didn’t work for me. So if you just renamed the fonts (as I could see), try deleting those. You can get those fonts again from net if something goes wrong.