Little magazines of Kolkata and Bengali magazine from Nashik

It is a well-known fact that Bengalis are poets at heart and they understand the intricacies of not only politics but also of football, cricket and the fine arts. They believe in the age-old maxim of ‘what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow’. As a result, they suffer from a sort of superiority complex and they will never admit it.
Anyway, when some Bengalis get together and they have a common bond of writing either poetry or prose, there would be an automatic desire to see their names in print. The Bengalis in Nashik were no different and, I was one of them.

I had already been writing in a few magazines of Kolkata and there was another gentleman who wrote poems – he had managed to get a footing of sorts in the little magazine sector. This little-mag sector was unique to Bengali culture and had been born to allow up and coming writers to try and secure a toehold in the highly competitive world or writing.
Believe it or not, there are established writers who had graduated from little magazines to big magazines and, finally, became big names in the literary world.
Incidentally, little magazines hold a special place in Bengali culture and, in the annual Book Fair held in Kolkata, a separate section is reserved for Little Mags.
Then there was an elderly woman, the wife of one of our colleagues, who was an established writer with a few books to her name. And, along with her, there were some more Bengalis who were poets or writers at heart.
Well – all these faithfuls of Bengali literary world decided to meet one evening every month and read out our literary creations and allow others to comment and criticize the outputs. (to be continued …)