Editorial & Content : November 2013

In the world where we began to write, there were no paid writing workshops; unlike the one we now inhabit – no Creative Writing programs, no Master of Fine Arts degrees in poetry or novel writing, no grants for the genius. There were other things that took the place of formal classrooms in creative writing – college canteens, College Street Coffee House, the portico in Presidency College, roadside tea shop, half-lit second hand bookstores.

These were the spaces where we congregated to read each other’s write-ups, to argue over them, to tear them apart. These were the spaces which enabled us to see our names in printed letters for the first time, to feel that we are parts of something bigger – something bigger than ourselves. We grew up and came of age as writers and we often stepped out of the boundary of the language or the medium in which we first wrote, but we stayed within the spaces that were generated by the little magazine movement in Kolkata; spaces that, by and large, were nurtured by a healthy disdain for, and distance from the professionalization and commercialization of writing.

We would like to begin Aainanagar with that distance in mind. This is a space not for professionals, a space for those who are not the resident writers of any degree-granting institutions. In its pages, we want to recreate that arrogance – the special kind that only amateurs and non-professionals can muster. Professionals are welcome, but in order to get the hang of this Little space of ours, may they leave their professionalisms behind for a while.

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• Content

LITTLE MAGAZINE OF THE MONTH

Apar 2013

POETRY

Collected by Sudip Manna – দৃশ্যের কোনও ভাষ্য হয়না

Nithya Sivashankar – Ripples

Moritz weber – Poems

Partha Pratim Moitra – বদরপুর জংশন – দ্বিতীয় কিস্তি

NON-FICTION

Nandini Dhar – Whose Trauma Is It, Anyway?

Sutanya Chakraborty – কাঙ্গাল মালসাট

Ranjith Hegde – The ‘Art’ of Chess

Ravi Kunjwal – To Belong

FICTION

Tridib Sengupta – পাখি আর মেঘ

Kamal Lodaya – North-South

Subrata Dasgupta – কনফেশন ডায়রী

PHOTOGRAPHY

Bijoy Chowdhury – Bohurupee (masquerades) – An Extinct Rural Folk Art of Bengal

REVIEW

Madhushree Basu – People vs. Indianostrum

• Illustrations and photo courtesy

Koustabh Chakraborty (বদরপুর জংশন – দ্বিতীয় কিস্তি)

Joyeeta Karan (পাখি আর মেঘ)

Sourav Dey (Poems)

Jayanti Basu (Ripples)

Pupai (North-South, কনফেশন ডায়রী )

Pramod Gupta (photos of Buro da with দৃশ্যের কোনও ভাষ্য হয়না)

Soumyajit Pramanick (photo with To Belong)

Indianostrum (photos of rehearsal with People vs. Indianostrum)

Saptarshi Prokashoni original cover for Kangal Malsat (কাঙ্গাল মালসাট).

• Without whom, all this would be nowhere

We are thankful to Sudip Manna, Pramod Gupta, Somnath Mukhopadhyay, Anurag Das, Soumyajit Pramanick, Debashis Sengupta, Sarthak Singha, Buro da, Titu and many others, whom we met through the journey of Little magazine ‘Apar’. We thank the illustrators; most of them had to come up with their work within a very short period and at the same time had to deal with our continuous nervous twitches through email and phone, caused mostly by the delay in publicizing the first issue of Aainanagar due to various seen and unseen reasons. We are happy to announce that Koustabh Chakraborty, the illustrator of Badarpur junction, has published his first book of painting named ‘Ekraikhik‘, through the publishers ‘Houdinir Tanbu’ based at Kolkata.

-Editors