Cutchi Language Tutorial, Kerala
Community Bonding  - September 2019

Community magazines are the thread that weaves the bond among its members. 

Our community in Kerala is spread from Kochi to Alleppy and from Quilon to Trivandrum and the needs of the community are met through the well-organized Jamaths in all regions. Memon Boli is an initiative to create a platform for the internal communication among the members of the community throughout   Kerala. And through this, develop a pan -Kerala image for our community through Memon Boli. 

Memon Boli will provide the space for the members of our community to express their creativity through articles, poems, stories, recipes, and more!

Our Youth - November 2019

Our gratitude to one and all for the acceptance of our first issue of Memon Boli. A special thanks to our Kochi Jamath Sait - Mr.Anwar Hashim Sait, for accepting our request and presiding as the guest of honor during its launch.

I hope all our readers enjoyed reading our first issue.

Recently, I got the opportunity to attend the Kochi Jamath general board meeting. While there, I was looking around to see the young faces of our community and realized that there were very few around. It brought to mind the words of our Jamath Sait when he replied to a query from me while interviewing for Memon Boli. “Now all have gone into their shells” This was not just a statement from him, there were pain and anguish in those words.


Editor’s Note-  From the Desk of Ansar Shakoor
January2020
“INSTANT RELATIONS AND DIVORCE” 

Everything around us now is instant. Instant coffee and instant food are now common in kitchens. By the click of an icon, we get friends from around the world on our mobiles and our laptops. We never see many of those “instant friends” but develop a relationship that will be disposed of at any moment. People today quit on relationships as instantly as they start them.

“Think and Grow Rich” is a book by Napoleon Hill that I will suggest all youngsters should read. In that book, he wrote about “Three feet from Gold”. It is built on the idea that when one faces a temporary failure one quits. The incident goes like this, One R.U. Darby and his team gave up digging gold when they didn’t find it. They sold all their machinery cheaply and left. The guy who purchased the digging machinery for junk from Darby seek the expert advice of a mining engineer and found the bulk of gold merely three feet from where Darby stopped drill-ing. This incident happened during the “goldRush” in the United States.

MARCH 2020

Kutch Tour & Bhuj Jamath - a Memorable journey down the lanes of Kutch, Bhuj and other villages.

Cutchi Language Tutorials organised a Kutch tour in the 1st week of February, from the 4th to the 9th of the month. I think it was the first tour of Kutch in a group from Kochi. CLT members can be proud that we did it without any kind of prior experience, Alhamdulillah

We thank Mr.S.M.Junaid Sait for ingraining in us the seed of desire for such a tour. 

It was an opportunity for many of us to visit our ancestral place and take a peek into the past. The Past that was buried deep in time, and the marks were removed by the earthquake. What we saw on our trip was the people of the present engaged in  the struggle for their existence.

And yet, we all eagerly looked around for a familiarity of some sort that connected us to this city.

Though we couldn’t particularly identify any place to say “They” came from here, I heard many saying that, “They” might have walked through this barren lands lying afar, as we made our way through the land of our ancestors…

Finally one day our tour took us to one small village, where amongst all our touristy shopping  we heard our language - exactly as we speak. It was a moment of excitement. We kept talking and engaging with them over and over again to hear our language being spoken by the people of Kutch. Extremely similar to the way as we speak. … We all were sure, ”They” would’ve, definitely might have come from here.?

Bhuj, is the center of the federation of 22 Jamaths in Kutch. Bhuj, Mandvi, Mundra, Naliya, Kothara, Vdadiya, Goyalmokhera, Memonvand, Pandhro, Mindiyari, Fulra, Gadsisa, Kodey, Shirva, Bharaper, Dahisra, Gagoder, Godhera, Kisanper, Basvav, and Khrakuva. All these Jamaths work closely together, helping each other and developing a strong bond  between them. They conduct mass marriage every year which reduces the burden of marriage expenses. Their    income is the rent from the shops, donations and the rent from the Jamath khana they give for functions to the memons and non-memons alike. They informed us that their Jamath is,  Alhamdulillah, financially well to do and self reliant. (Some among us jokingly said before going that they may ask us for financial help - this was far from the truth).

Another thing I noticed is the youg blood in the Jamath. They told us, after the earthquake the old members of the Jamath all moved out paving the way for youngsters to come forward. The professionals and the youngsters re-built it. Most of the committee members who came to greet us were between the age of 25 to 35. Their treasurer is a CA.
Experiences of this trip is a treasure I will cherish all my life. Insha Allah, I will share some of those in the future.

In Kerala we got Jamaths at different places, can’t we think about a federation of these  Jamaths?  In unity lies the power.…

In our Cutchi Language Tutorials group, I posted about “Divorce” asking for group member's opinions on the issue. Many members responded with their views, but all agreed that pre-marital counseling can help reduce the conflict in the newly married couples. If counseling is further extended to the parents, it can deliver much better results.

 
 
 
Before this disposable instant culture creates more havoc in families and in our society let us face it and defeat it. Jamath is the body of our community that is an instrument to introduce and implement new rules that can benefit our community. (Read FACE TO FACE interviewe with Mr.Rasheed Usman’s opinion about this January issue)

Hope pre-marital counseling will become a reality one day and it will minimize the “quitters” in our society and the divorce rate in our community.
A Magazine for the Cutchi Memon Community of Kerala
The success of any magazine depends on its readers. All the members of CLT (Cutchi Language Tutorials) may send us feed-back through “Letters to Editor.” Your opinions helps us improve. Express it…rocks or roses, throw it. Together we can make Memon Boli the voice of our community in Kerala. 

It is a great honor to be part of the editorial board and I look  forward to the cooperation of all members to bring out a standard magazine every two months. 

Special thanks to all our readers, without you, we wouldn’t be doing this. 

Write, Promote your relative or memon friend to write, Send to cltkerala@gmail.com
We all will agree that the youth should be at the forefront of community services and activities. Our youth are the future leaders. Jamath general board meetings are places where important decisions related to the community are made. Young people must come forward and should put their suggestions on building a strong community. The cynicism should be shed and they should get involved in the problems our community face daily.

All Kutchi Memon Jamaths from Trivandrum, Quilon, and Alleppy may be facing this problem of lack of interest from the youth. Jamath in all those places can inspire our young qualified youth by delegating responsibilities, by nominating them directly to special committees and by involving them in decision making.

The involvement of today's youngsters is vital to the survival of our community and the senior members of the Jamath could be the mentors in creating enthusiasm in their minds and bringing them to the forefront of our jamath activities.

Giving up easily when going goes tough is not a habit we want to inculcate in our youth. This “quitting” habit is not limited to the material world but extends to our relations with others, es-pecially when the relations are developed instantly. When the young couples they find that the relations they got in, is not matching with their dreams they knitted, they give up without real-izing that by the expert advice they can grab the gold that lies three feet away from them. By taking a step back and reassessing the situations and perhaps how they have reacted to it so far, they can achieve not just the family relations they dreamt of, but God-willing an even better one.

 
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