Editorial
Revisiting our Culture

As we immerse ourselves into American society, we seem to be loosing our cultural identity. For many Nepalese, taking a special trip to Nepal is a luxury. As the Nepalese community grows in size around the country, we need to think about new strategies to promote and preserve our cultural heritage.

Is Bhoy and special get together once a year good enough to preserve our culture? I don't know how important it is for parents to educate their children about our culture regardless of their ethnic heritage. As I look around the Nepalese community from east to west, north to south, parents are struggling to teach their children about our culture. As American-Nepalese assimilate into this pluralistic society, we will further distance ourselves from our homeland's culture. What are the remedies for keeping our tradition alive and vibrant?

Whenever, I talk to young people about our cultural, they give me a dirty look. What is this guy talking about? NPPA's goal and objectives are fine, but we need to go beyond the comfort zone and have a long range plan and vision. Should we be thinking about long range plan to have special summer camps to teach language and culture? As the African proverb says " It takes a whole village to raise a child", but the unfortunate part is that we don't have that many people to help because we are all scattered around the country.

We must all come together and try to plan special programs to teach and share. We have a very small number of people who know about our traditional culture. We are not a homogeneous culture. Even within Newar community we do things differently from one another.

We must look into planning future activities that will promote and preserve our cultural heritage. As the article by Beena Gubhaju, indicated, we are loosing our culture very rapidly. The poem by Neeraj Pradhan points out the new way and old way of doing things. Yes, that's the way it is in here and when we go to Kathmandu, we find a whole different way of doing things. His summer long stay in Kathmandu made him much more aware of his true culture and values.

Although, NPPA is working to keep our cultural heritage alive by sponsoring this annual event, we need to do more. We need to look beyond annual gatherings and plan more programs to educate our future generation before it gets to late. As Newari proverb says "tJya%gu _y%gya s:sI&du" "Broken vase sounds differnt" If we don't develop new strategies, it will be like hearing a sound of a broken vase.

Once again, I want to thank all those individuals, who helped by placing an ad to raise fund for our scholarship and those individuals who helped to write articles to promote our cultural heritage.

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