Hindi Divas celebration
IT was good to read on various platforms that certain institutions and organisations have celebrated Hindi day extremely well. In fact, we have been celebrating Hind day over years. There are world level conferences on Hindi as well.
However, I have also noted that the very participants of celebrations use English to communicate even in their home environment. This negates all the positives emanating from such celebrations. Let us be genuine in promoting Hindi (both Fiji and standard) beginning from our homes.
One has to take a look at our teacher training institutions in terms of preparing teachers to teach Hindi.
This subject is one of the most neglected areas in terms of proficiency in teaching as well as the curricular content.
Just ask children from primary schools and the feedback would confirm my statement. Just no one likes teaching Hindi and our children hate this subject given its status on the class timetable.
Even our religious leaders have been ineffective in this area. What is this? How effective are our organised functions with regards to Hindi?
No one knows. The only thing all know and neglect is that Hindi is slowly being buried in our education system together with our daily usage of such a mother tongue. In fact, we do not have many writers who can write scripts on our Fiji literature and experiences. Who is promoting this?
Let us not celebrate Hindi day to meet the organisational output but to ensure the longevity of our identity realistically. It does not mean that you are user of Hindi and you are an outcast in this era.
Nothing replaces your identity even upon your graduation with the highest qualification.
God bless our Hindi language and its users. My salute to for printing
for so many years without much support from our organistions that should have been supporting such a publication. In fact, it should be one of the basic roles of all our Hindi user institutions to get organised and begin publishing at least a monthly newspaper/magazine for us.
Will this ever happen or the only thing our religious institutions will be concentrating on is the rituals and its rights and wrongs? DHIRENDRA PRASAD Lautoka