If there’s a child aged between 3 to 10 in your house, there’s no doubt that the TV channel that is turned on most of the time is a cartoon channel. It’s obvious that the children of this age group love to watch cartoon shows, no matter what language it is in. When we talk about the television scenario in Nepal, every second channel is a news channel and rest of the other ‘supposed to be entertainment’ channels too air news every hour. Of course it’s important to be informed about what’s going on around the world but that doesn’t mean that every single channel we have need to be telling us about it. We have no sports channel and so we have to rely on online streaming of our sports teams’ matches otherwise the only option we have left is to just see the score and keep on refreshing the webpage every single minute. This is why we have to heavily rely on TV channels from our neighboring country for not only sports or cartoon, but entertainment, music and movie channels as well. In other words, apart from fuel and almost every single thing we need to use everyday, we are almost fully dependent on India for our entertainment needs as well. So this brings us back to the topic we are talking about today; the cartoon channels we have in Nepal are the Indian subsidiaries of the international TV networks with their shows in Hindi, of course. Learning a new language is definitely a good thing but it might be a problem when the children start speaking the foreign language more fluently than their own language. You must have noticed that children these days in Nepal speak more Hindi than Nepali and they don’t even realize that as they have become so used to this language watching the cartoons most of the time, they feel more comfortable speaking Hindi. We even doubt that later in future this generation will announce Hindi as the national language of Nepal. Children learn the most during this very age and what they see on TV makes a huge impact on their learning and growing phase. That’s quite an opportunity for us to show them something that teaches them things they actually need to know about. That’s where a cartoon channel, which almost all of us have taken for granted, comes to value.
Now talking about the practical possibilities of starting a cartoon channel, not that we are experts on it but talking in general, it actually seems quite promising from the point of view of business and economical profits as well. Like we said earlier, in any house with children aged between 3 to 10, the most watched channel is a cartoon channel which simply means a good scope of commercial advertisements. About the content, some international cartoon shows can be dubbed in Nepali, like NTV did with Swedish cartoon ‘Moomin’, as we do have some really good voice actors in Nepal. Some original new series can also be started as there are some extremely talented animators who can surely create something interesting for the children. That way the children would not only get entertained but can learn more about our culture, traditions and values as well. So, anyone up for this idea?
Making it clear again, we do not intend to offend the people who speak a certain language and it’s unarguably a good thing that a child learns as many new languages as possible; but that doesn’t mean that they should lose interest in their very own language.
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