Over the last decade, there is a surge in the events promoting linguistic endeavors and riveting literature driven programs. The Social media boom broke the barriers of the geographical location and the dependency on just the print medium. From the courtyards of the elites, literature was made available to the masses and the classes alike. This also facilitated the availability of the books online in the west.
The growing population of the South Asian diaspora resulted in the creation of cultural hubs around literary centers. While the local community organizations focused on promoting South Asian languages, the scope of these efforts was restricted to teaching the scripts of Hindi and Urdu but didn’t aim at inciting the passion for the literature in the second-generation immigrants that one sees in the west for French, Greek, Russian and Spanish literature.
To bring Hindi to the parallel with other foreign languages, we need to bring Hindi with English on the same stage and make it interesting to the youngsters. Paschim aims at bridging this gap and creating activities that will take it forward with 2nd 3rd Gen Indians through a quite different approach. Rather than taking an etymological approach, it is important to create parallels with the English language vis-à-vis poets and writers that they are already familiar with. To understand the richness of the literary work done by the great Indian writers, Paschim aims to create platforms and avenues to bring contemporaries of various art forms together.
For example: – It is easier for people to understand Gandhi through Martin King Luther, similarly it is easier for people to understand the works of Mahadevi Verma or Amrita Pritam through the works of Maya Angelou, the works of Shiv Kumar Batalvi through Sylvia Plath.
Our plan is to do this by various social experiments like Town halls of Hindi and English laureates on same forum, Video production of Hindi/Urdu and English poetry, discussions, author interviews, book reviews, book fairs, Art of Story-telling, writing workshops, plays, research on similar era authors on both languages of same genre etc. and involve the youth on the whole process so that they can come closer to the language. To further this effort, we would like to invite you to a session of Poetry with The Paschim project.
