Letter to the editor

“Kashmir As It Is” Team Deserves Appreciation From Whole Community For Their Contribution Towards Welfare Of Community….👍👍👍👍👍.. Preservation Of Our Culture ,Languages,Rituals etc. Is The Only Way To Let The Whole World Know That We Were , We Are & We Wll Be Part & Parcel Of Kashmir & Without Us It’s Incomplete…I Personally Respect Ur Contribution/ Efforts Not Only For The Revival Of Our Traditional Part But Also For The Informative Sessions Likewise “Kath Baath”…Lassiv T Mujood Rooziv…

First thing first,I love the name कॖशीर यिछ़ छ़ि तिछ़ॖय very appropriate.Kudos to creative team.
Secondly I appreciate the inclusive nature of this plateform .Because exclusivity isolates and we kashmiri are gregarious people. Quite thoughtful.
Thirdly persistent afforts to bring back vocabulary e.g दोद द्युन which we cebrate as गोद भराई these days.
Congratulations to the whole team और बेलोस काम के लिये शत शत नमन

Namaskaar with the blessings of Lord Shiva to all of you.  Heartiest congratulations for all the efforts put by the whole team of  Kashmir as it is.All the topics  are based on the right concepts. I hope such topics would definitely encourage the younger K.P.generation  to understand Kashmiri culture in the right perspective.

Namaskar.

Today morning will scrambling through face book posts i came across one post of Karuna Raina Ji which really made my day .I am not only encouraged but was very happy to see this platform kashmirasitis.com doing great service to Kashmiri language .I congratulate your whole team from core of my heart for making effort to encourage people to learn and talk in their own mother language that i personally feel is dying fast death as new generation prefers to speak in Hindi or English.In fact i always thought of some medium or platform where people can exchange things about their culture and language . God bless you all and may your massage of love for your own language reaches every corner of world .

Ashaq Hussain Wani
Jammu and Kashmir

Date – 31st Jan 2021

Dear Zitin, Really. Such a nice beginning to encourage Kashmiri speaking at home.

I have a wondering. When someone says,”we should speak in Kashmiri to our kids”, I appreciate that but also what is important is that we encourage our children to answer back in Kashmiri. What happens most often is that only we end up using the language. Kids understand but ask them to speak, they can’t.

I am a parent of two, 17 and 13 year olds. We have been moving around the world since my first child was 8 months old. We very soon realised that as we keep moving to different countries with different languages, there can be only one constant; it is our Kashmiri culture and our Kashmiri language. So we would speak and listen to only one language among ourselves when at home.

Children spend most of the day at school and tend to bring home the spoken language at school. So I would give them a transition period of one hour or so and after that I would not allow them to talk in any other language. With the result

They can communicate fluently in Kashmiri language. My parents and other older relatives love to have conversation with them. Dil khulith chae saeree bolaan.

The whole idea of writing this is to pass on the message that it is more important that we make our kids reply back in Kashmiri. Don’t reply if they talk in any other language. That’s what we would do.

I thought it would be just another step forward.

Thanks

Mrinali Safaya

Dear KAII Team,

Rhyme contest – The experience was wonderful. Wish we had known about it in October itself. We don’t speak kashmiri at home, so most of the lyrics in the rhymes went above my head 🙂

Om memorized all the 5 rhymes by rote quickly in 2 days though, so that was a relief. So maybe you would like to spread more awareness and it would help add numbers to the group as well. I have already done it at my end! 🙂

I also feel while having a contest is nice, but that is assuming the elders at home know the language fluently. So before the contest, if someone could explain the meaning or help construct sentences related to whatever contest happens, will be great. Thanks for all the efforts you put in. The child in the sample rhymes is very cute. And it was good to have the adult voice with exact pronunciation of the lyrics. Please try to add sub-titles too for those like us. Overall amazing job done. Thanks again.

Warm regards,

Teevrta Kaul

Dear Editor,
I heard Shivani Bhan for the first time.I was impressed by the zeal and sincerity of the purpose for her objective….My salutations to her and KAII.I have a few observations not as a critique but for consideration as you go along in this Project.
1. There is much more to repair than limit it to post 1989 tragedy.
2. Our slide in preservation of our Culture is as old as our existence.
3.The mindset to use “scientific” yardstick to gauge the status of our Cultural markers is flawed. A great part of our culture is ‘heart’ based and not ‘head’ based.So We must gauge our status on feeling/faith quotient.
4.It is so heartening to see how our Gen-Next is passionate about gathering the strewn mores and values and document them.Wish our elders had thought on these lines earlier.
5.The Cultural marker of our Language- Kashmiri has historically been stuck in the script issue.First it was pushed back our expediency to master court languages and post independence it got mired in Majority Minority issue. Diagraphia as a solution was never pursued as a preservation tool.We have many scripts like Devanagari,Sharada,Roman and of course Nastaliq. We have been engaged in securing script on Hindu / Muslim basis.The language has suffered as has the transmission of cultural corpus.
6. We must not let go any of the issues influencing our Culture , be it Vedic ,Puranic, Buddhist or Islamic.
7. To encourage older generation to write about our past to capture all elements.

Ashok Dullu 

Namaskar.
I am very much encouraged to see this platform kashmirasitis.com active in the field of our language, our culture and our heritage. Any social platform which is not commercial, even if a small one, provides ample opportunities to common people to know about and learn things which they are not aware of. Knowing more about our language and culture in an alien land and alien atmosphere, is a priority for our young and not so young. Let us take its advantage and salute the people behind these platforms, for spending their valuable time and energy for us.
Our central theme at Project Zaan is ‘Know Your Roots’ and our slogan is ‘Kashmiri Language is our Passport to our Motherland’. Let us try to know it as much as we can.
My sincere Kudos to Zitni Dhar for carrying the fire of nativity in her heart and sharing the same with all of us.

M.K.Raina.
Convenor, Project Zaan
10th August 2020