Good morning, यहाँहरू सबैलाई हार्दिक नमस्कार। हार्दिक स्वागत।
It’s my honor to welcome you all in this venue, to this Kathmandu Conference on Communication and Media, where we wish आ नो भद्राः क्रतवो यन्तु विश्वतः May noble thoughts come towards us from all directions.
Dr. Shobha Shrestha, Prof. Dr. Dubinanda Dhakal, keynote speaker Prof. P. Kharel and Chair Dr. Kundan Aryal. It’s our honor to welcome you on stage and listen to you.
Distinguished guests, academicians from different disciplines, session chairs, paper presenters, moderators, all participants, media persons and friends, a very warm welcome to you all. Colleagues from Central Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, TU and CMR-Nepal, all your hard work has made this moment possible. Welcome and thank you.
Self-reflection is a part of every conference and this conference also gives us the opportunity to examine and analyze what or how we are thinking and working in our field. Over the next couple of days, we will surely be sharing our ideas with each other. We shall deliberate and learn for the better. And I hope the range and diversity of papers lined up will help us think more broadly.
The idea of “mass” has captivated us since quite some time. The popular notion of mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption and mass communication has become an integral part of our life and displaced the in-person communications in family and society. Further, we seem to not notice non-verbal communication altogether even though the general assumption being that our communication is 70-90 percent non-verbal and only 10-30 percent verbal.
We are communicating for business, market, production and trying to address the mass but are missing to communicate with our children at home, with our parents and grandparents in hospital beds unable to utter a single word yet communicating with tears as we hold their hands in the last stage of their life.
This conference is only a beginning. We hope we will work towards diversifying the field of communication studies so that we gain better insights and we all can communicate for a better future personally, socially and culturally.
Once again, welcome you all. Thank you.