As I have mentioned earlier, there were a few Bengalis who could write – maybe their creations would never have got any award but, they knew their limitations and restricted their literary pursuits to penning a poem once in a while or a write a short story or travelogue.
Those were the days when mobile phones had not invaded out lives and e-mail and SMSes were unknown – therefore, people had to write at least the letters to their families back home. Therefore, they did have the knack of penning their thoughts in the form of sentences. And, when peppered with a few quotes or two liners from Tagore, the end products could pass off as original literary creations.
A handful of writers would assemble once a month for a literary session where the participants would read out their poems or stories and others would applaud them and offer their criticisms. These monthly get-togethers would be held on someone’s roof subject to weather conditions. These were occasions to encourage would-be writers to emerge into the open.
In one such gathering, a proposal was put up to create a magazine of our own – to begin with, it would be cyclostyled and the periodicity would be three-monthly because writing on stencils which had to be cyclostyled was a long drawn process. Moreover, writing on a stencil was the work of an expert and such experts were not very many.
Anyway, putting aside all fears, our Bengali magazine from Nashik finally saw the light of day – it was named ‘Nalanda’ and it contained a number of poems, a couple of short stories and a couple of essays. Obviously, the number of poems was more because these occupy less space and more poets can be accommodated. The more the participation, the better would be the reach of the magazine. to be continued …)
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