(Dear Reader, you are welcome to read our November 2014 issue as PDF downloadable from here. But do take a look at the blog-version, in particular to check out the Photography and the Graphics sections of this issue, the Little Magazine Of The Month: Apar 2007 (Pujo) and a short film: ‘Ku Jhik Jhik’.)
Happy birthday to us. Aainanagar is a whole year old now. We have managed to survive so far and still toddling! Which is not a small thing for us, dear readers, as in this one year both us editors have been on a continuous fight against a certain apathy towards growing up. Our ten-years-old-girly selves were tightening their lips, folding their hands and totally refusing to admit that this little space of ours was being of any practical use, doing any greater good to mankind, or even was supposed to do any of those. Yes, we are proud to be a means for a considerable number of beautiful creative pieces reaching out to a comparatively larger audience; but who does this audience consist of? Do they really have a need for more of these tendrils of the Literary, the Auditory and the Visual reaching out to them? Basically, who reads Aainanagar? Why?
Frankly, it is as much an enigma to us as it is to others who have asked us this question. Because the days of our youth, of reading for reading’s sake and raising storms in the teacups are certainly gone. There is too much of information already lying out there for anyone to pick up. With the advent of internet, for the first time in human history, there are more givers than takers in the field of the Arts and great ones at that. Then what is the point of walking backward in evolution to produce yet another Little Magazine (albeit in a new-ish bottle), that too a bilingual animal – like Sukumar Ray’s Whalelephant? In the face of a direct interrogation – why, who, what – we either scratch our heads or try to get away with one of the many well-rehearsed vague phrases of neo-intellectualism. Such. As.
Let us confess – we are such helpless suckers for the New! We love the feeling of receiving, touching, going through and gobbling down the New contributions that we manage to lay our hands on. New thoughts, new emotions, new rhythms, new words, new dabs of paintbrushes are the way we communicate with our surroundings. The fact that something new is being created and we are getting the opportunity to witness the process, while engaging in discussions with each other, and finally mix-matching them to our whims and pasting them down to our pages makes us very non-profoundly satisfied in life. We admit, we are super-possessive, over-protective, absolutely-obsessed and total creeps – intruding the-hell-within our contributors’ backyards – nagging, bugging, ragging till we have it. Our littleness lies in our uselessness, our interest in anything that we are seeing for the first time and our meanness at achieving it. As for ‘bilinguality’ – this is the language that we deal with in our everyday life. We think, read, talk bilingual; hence indulging ourselves into this realm of a bunch of horse-eggs. We ourselves are the whalelephants here, already.
We admit on this happy occasion that we do this to please ourselves and to please ourselves further by sharing this pleasure with whoever feels like pleasing themselves with it. We do have our own personal interests and choices but this quest for New is what drives us forward when it comes to this particular venture of ours. So, dear friends, do say cheers to Aainanagar, with its New and its Old. We hereby invite you to scroll down to the much more endurably precise Content of our current issue, which as always contains a whole lot more new stuff than our editorial rant. Ah, as the Dropbox says – ‘ Happy Sharing’!
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- Content
LITTLE MAGAZINE OF THE MONTH
POETRY
Debarchana Sarkar – গল্প ও কবিতারা
Mitrava Banerjee – তিনটি কবিতা
Mihir Vatsa – Five Poems
Dinabandhu Bhattacharya – আননপুস্তকের কবিতা
Sara Basu – আবহমান
Avinaba Sarkar – জীবন তোঃ
Elishiba Kui – ইশকাপনের রাত
FICTION
Rohan Halder – জোঁকাবুড়ো ও কঙ্কাবতী
Kalpana Rentala – The Fifth Wall…
Srabani Dasgupta – অন্য আকাশ
Sharanya Dutta – ভাইফোঁটা
Maitreyee Sarkar – পার্বতী কথা
Arnab Dutta – হা হা সময়
NON-FICTION
Debashis Aich – নিমকাঠির জীবন
Rana Alam – মুসলমানের কিসসা
Nandini Dhar – How To Solve The Problem of Udayan: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland
Ravi Kunjwal – Books Abandoned
Rupa Aich – আমার জীবন কাটে উত্তরের অপেক্ষায়
Sarmishta Mani – Our Past In Our Present Age
GRAPHICS
#HokKolorob – A Compilation: Where Art Becomes The Language Of Protest
Swarna Jana – Slices Of Rain
Soumadeep Sen & Madhushree Basu – The Blue Umbrella – A Graphic Poem
TRAVELOGUE
Meera Srikant – Jungle trails (A trip to Kabini River Lodge)
PHOTOGRAPHY
Arjun Rajendran – Smiling And Other Animals
Sumit Ghosh – Le Pont Howrah
VIDEOGRAPHY
Arindam Srimani – কু ঝিক ঝিক (Ku Jhik Jhik – a Bengali short film with English subtitles)
REVIEW
Kamal Lodaya – A Play, A Book, Two Nations (Girish Karnad’s ‘Boiled Beans On Toast’ & Haruki Murakami’s ‘Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage’)
- Without Whom All This Would Be Nowhere
We vehemently thank Pramod Gupta, Chiranjib Paul and Soumyajit Pramanick, who have practically done all the dirty work behind getting this issue out. We are indebted to the bunch of our little illustrators – Ru Das, Joyeeta Karan and Saptak Dasgupta for not only their contributions but also their absolute professional sincerity and dependability – kudos! We thank Arijit Chakravarty and Aneyezine for their archival work on the recent protest movement at Jadavpur university, part of which we have presented here. Last but not at all the least, we would like to thank The Seagull Foundation For The Arts, in particular Megha Malhotra and Paroma Sengupta for their warm invitation and collaboration on behalf of their Story-telling project ‘Peace Works‘. We are looking forward to working further ahead with the artworks created by the children participants of the same project.