Monday 31 January 2011

Kavita Kosh: A visionary marvel

Having a break from the series of Origin of English words today, I would like to post about an act of vision which not only deserves to be respected but it is also an act of adulation, admiration and our unscathed attention!!


Civilization began and man started to use language to communicate, to express himself and soon a need was felt that text needed to be conserved. There were stones, clay tablets, wax tablets, papyrus, silk and what not! All these were used before the technological innovation of books. All what was written came to be recorded in books. But with the passage of time, the methods and means to record and collect the documents too have undergone a drastic change. Present age is the age of internet and high tech devices. Hundreds and thousand of documents can be uploaded, saved and retrieved with just a click of the mouse.

Well versed in the attributes of this wonderful medium and being an expert in its application, an IT professional, Mr Lalit Kumar, in 2006 i.e. just four years back, conceptualized the idea of coming up with a website where poetry could be documented and saved. To be a visionary one does not need any specific qualification, a special degree or an accreditation from an academic institution. It is the thought that matters and the thought here was to develop an encyclopaedia of poetry where poetry lovers could find, read and satisfy their literary cravings The website, Kavita Kosh(www.kavitakosh.org), soon developed as a chest or we can say a treasure house of Hindi as well as Urdu poetry where one could find poems of all eras and varied genres.

From Vedas and Upnishads to the ghazals of Gulzar, from regional poems to folk songs, from creations of the great veteran poets to the contemporary works of budding poets, from complete anthologies to the songs written for children, we can find every kind of literary work here in this website.

This uphill task of making Kavita Kosh a literary repository could not be done by single person. Soon a team of voluntary contributors and intellectuals came together. The team of Kavita Kosh has been working relentlessly since then and that too without any commercial interest. An intrinsic motivation makes them work so hard and cooperate with each other in the best possible way. Kudos to their diligent work!

Kavita Kosh is a kind of boon for those engaged in research work in Hindi Literature and Hindi/Urdu poetry. It should also not go unnoticed that it is also filling the cultural chasm for those Indians who are living outside India holding them to their mother tongue and mother land. It is a blessing for all the poetry lovers!

The site allows room and opportunities for the readers and poets to edit the poems and add new ones. Being a kind of virtual library, Kavita Kosh is doing a fantabulous job of preserving and conserving our literature which otherwise is prone to get destroyed in the wake of the influence of western culture at present.

Literature, though not biological, is just like a living being. It breathes, expresses itself and can live beyond the lives of those who have created it if it is preserved appropriately. Whether prose or poetry, literature has transcendental properties. Kavita Kosh, in real sense is working towards conserving our literary heritage.

The present day concept of exhibiting success envisages the use of a whole lot of quantitative and statistical figures. Henceforth the popularity of Kavita Kosh too can be measured and represented in numbers. It goes like this.

There are: 1118 poets, 186 shayar, 135 female poets, 391 poets who have translated poems, 1225 books, 5305 Ghazals, 502 Nazm, 12790 poems…..

And the list goes on and on…!!!

Let me come up with another astounding figure here…Every day more than 65000 pages of this website are visited… Phew! Isn’t it astonishing?

It is growing day by day….its length; breadth and height are increasing dynamically. For example, the recently added Audio section here gives us the opportunity to listen to the timeless poetry in the voice of legendary poets themselves. New plans for its further growth and development regarding the compilation of poetry are being regularly formulated and implemented. We hope that the quality work continues for the times to come. What all is needed is the increase in number of contributors who would put in their efforts to fulfil its real objective of making it an asset for the generations to come.

Thanks to Kavita Kosh that our future generations would definitely have a rendezvous with our literary and poetic legacies otherwise there are chances that they would only be able to learn “my hips don’t lie” in the name of poetry. The contribution made by Kavita Kosh needs all applause and accolades. We all need to understand the importance, its uniqueness and the significance of Kavita Kosh can be summed up in one single sentence, “The past and the present are being saved here for the future!”


The legendary maker of this site, Lalit Kumar has recently come up with a hindi blog aggregator by the name of “Lalitya”…And what my strong conviction is that this new project of his, would also grow exponentially as I feel that The Man has been blessed with “Midas Touch”


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