Bhopal : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday lifted the spirits of like-minded nationalists and Hindi lovers by sharing projections of experts that English, Chinese and Hindi will dominate the digital world in years to come.
Inaugurating the 3-day World Hindi conference on Lal Parade Ground in Makhan Lal Chaturvedi Nagar here, Modi teased his political rivals and attributed his knowledge of Hindi to his ‘chai wallah’ days: He recounted how he learnt Hindi while selling tea to milk-sellers from Uttar Pradesh who would come to his village to buy milch cows and ferry them in goods trains to Mumbai to sell milk there.
Modi, who made a breezy visit to the city of lakes to inaugurate the conference, said that although Hindi is not his mother tongue, he made efforts to learn Hindi and he shudders to think what his life would have been without Hindi.
Addressing a huge gathering of representatives from 39 countries, including the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, the Minister for Information Technology and the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the Prime Minister observed that a language is taken for granted as long as it is in use. He said that when an animal like Dinosaur becomes extinct, films are exhibited on what it looked like. Similarly, India cannot access the goldmine of knowledge in Sanskrit for want of Sanskrit scholars.
Modi further said that every generation should take upon itself the important task of conserving our linguistic heritage and value language as much as we value endangered plant and animal species by spending crores of rupees.
India is hosting the World Hindi conference at a cost of almost Rs 10 crore after a gap of 32 years. The World Hindi Conference was held for the first time in Nagpur in 1975. The opening day of the conference attracted 5,440 participants from several nations, including Afghanistan, Australia, Armenia, China, Fiji, Germany, Japan, Mauritus, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, USA and Uzbekistan.
Quoting projections of linguistics that 90 per cent of nearly 6000 languages spoken across the world will disappear by the end of the 21st century, the Prime Minister warned that we need to take immediate measures to conserve our language lest it become extinct like a Dinosaur and a subject of Archaeology.
He called upon persons associated with technology to create software and Apps in large numbers in regional languages and Hindi and said that language has the potential of becoming a bog bazaar in contemporary world with new technology.
Modi said that he fully appreciates the power of Hindi language. He pointed out that the movement of Hindi language was spearheaded by leaders like Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi and Lokmanya Tilak whose mother tongue was not Hindi.
The Prime Minister mooted the idea of a joint workshop of Tamil and Hindi language for assimilating unique words of Tamil to enrich Hindi. Modi said that he has first-hand experience of the power of a language. Citing an example, he said, ‘‘If I go to Tamil Nadu and utter Vanakkam, it has an electrifying effect. If I ask ‘Bhalo aasi” to a Bengali, he finds it flattering; likewise, if I meet any person from Maharashtra and say ‘Kasakay, kay chala hai’, he feels happy instantly. “
Modi said that the spread and reach of Hindi across the world is very encouraging and gave examples from his visits to Mauritus to lay the foundation stone of a secretariat of World Hindi Literature, release of a Uzbek-Hindi, Hindi-Uzbek dictionary in Uzbekistan and interaction with Hindi speaking people in Fudan University in China, Mongolia and Russia.
Tripti Nath
