19 April 2021 12:10 am
“Our sincere objective in launching our new youtube channel is to promote or traditional art and culture. Today the youtube serves as a powerful international media platform to reach global audiences. Our aim is not to compete or criticize anyone, but to create dialogues, showcase our rich and diverse traditional cultural and arts forms, that have been virtually distanced from ourselves and even the world. This is so tragic. Nobody seems to be concerned about preserving our own arts and culture. Even recently we saw how pathetically our Sinhala and Tamil New Year traditions were distorted in some of our mainstream television channels. Who is responsible for such acts? There are no ethical or moral guidelines to protect our traditions.
This is why we launched this channel to create a global impact to protect our country’s traditions,” Janaki Hill told Daily Mirror Life Impulse.
“We can’t use gossip or low-taste stuff to increase our reach. We need not pay money to boost our reach and increase the number of viewers or subscribers. We just need genuine, authentic subscribers. Some people claim to have millions of followers, subscribers or viewers, but the inside story is so different and so artificial. People tend to boast about millions of viewers by pumping in money to do so, which we cannot afford to do. Today distinguishing between genuine reach and artificial reach is another challenging task. We use our ADTF resources for this task and we cater to audiences in English and Sinhala. ADTF co-founder Perter Hill plays a huge and pivotal role, helping the channel with the English sub titles,” she said.
“Our programmes are spiced with entertainment, knowledge, inspirations and mainly a genuine need to promote our culture and arts. ”
“This ADTF youtube channel is a significant milestone in our ADTF history spanning about 13 years. Many hundreds have come through the foundation. Now it is time to showcase our talents to the much wider global audience, to create awareness about Sri Lanka’s culture and arts. There is scope to expand it incredibly. I play a role in providing the English translations to the native Sinhala language, to reach a bigger world audience. This is my marginal contribution to preserve Sri Lanka’s culture.
Personally I believe Sri Lanka has a rich, rich, rich cultural heritage under many disciplines. Many foreigners are keen to learn about traditional Sri Lankan dance, theatre and arts. It’s sad that the outside world knows very little about the authentic Sri Lankan traditional arts and cultural forms. Sri Lanka should do a lot more to promote its rich culture and arts. The ADTF youtube channel will certainly do its part to the best of its ability,” said Peter Hill.
text: Ramesh Uvais