Paras Ra­moutar

A new syl­labus is be­ing de­vised to teach Hin­di in T&T, ac­cord­ing to Suni­ta Pahjua, sec­ond sec­re­tary, In­di­an High Com­mis­sion."The High Com­mis­sion of In­dia con­ducts reg­u­lar Hin­di class­es at sev­en cen­tres all over the coun­try where in ex­cess of 200 stu­dents are learn­ing Hin­di. This year, we have re­struc­tured this pro­gramme, de­vis­ing a new syl­labus to suit the needs of the peo­ple of Trinidand and To­ba­go, with a link to Hin­di train­ing cen­tres in In­dia for study­ing Hin­di at a high­er lev­el af­ter com­plet­ing a three-lev­el course in the High Com­mis­sion Pro­gramme," she said, fol­low­ing a meet­ing with of­fi­cials of the Cur­ricu­lum Di­vi­sion, Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.Pahjua said at the meet­ing with Min­istry of­fi­cials, it sug­gest­ed a pi­lot project be in­tro­duced in at least one school ini­tial­ly and lat­er the project could be ex­tend­ed to oth­er schools:"We al­so as­sured the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion that the High Com­mis­sion would pro­vide ed­u­ca­tion­al ma­te­ri­als such as books, dic­tio­nar­ies and CDs and fa­cil­i­tate the train­ing of teach­ers."Pahjua said the Min­istry ad­vised it was con­duct­ing a sur­vey on the teach­ing of Hin­di.

She said there were about 7,000 lan­guages spo­ken in the world and Chi­nese or Man­darin topped the list, while Hin­di was the sec­ond largest spo­ken lan­guage in the world."Hin­di is spo­ken in more than 20 coun­tries and it is the of­fi­cial lan­guage of In­dia and Fi­ji, and the na­tion­al lan­guage in Mau­ri­tius and pop­u­lar in Suri­name. Hin­di is be­ing taught in more than 100 uni­ver­si­ties in the world and ac­tive mea­sures are be­ing pur­sued to make Hin­di as one of the of­fi­cial lan­guages of the Unit­ed Na­tions."

Pahjua not­ed that Hin­di had a spe­cial place in the hearts of the peo­ple of T&T be­cause it was the lan­guage of their an­ces­tors. As well, it is a lan­guage close to their emo­tion and iden­ti­ty."This is re­flect­ed in the preva­lence of many Hin­di words like roti, bhai (broth­er), pani (wa­ter), ya­j­na (prayers) and sitaram (greet­ing). Hun­dreds of Hin­di words are part of every­day life of Trinidad," she said."Al­though few peo­ple of Trinidad un­der­stand Hin­di, it is equal­ly true that more and more peo­ple are singing and even lis­ten­ing to In­di­an mu­sic re­sult­ing in a greater in­ter­est to­wards Hin­di," pahjua added.