Recently I was sifting through some old Annual digests of Bengali writing, and was noticing with great disappointment yet another damage that ex communist regime of West Bengal has done to its culture, after it settled down on the throne it systematically allowed only cadres and its knaves to flourish, thus the magazines that once published authors like Tagore, Sharatchandra, Bankimchandra – well the stuffs they published ten years back no literature lover will go through them, they felt like the dustbin of some hospital or morgue, full of ****
Of course there might have been a bouquet of flowers too in that dustbin but who will go through all that *** to pick up that bouquet?
My family home had collection of these annual magazines we Bengalis call Sharadiya (Autumnal- because it is published in autumn or to be more precise before durgapuja) from 100 year back I think, boy those books were something! They have been properly bound and kept by my family (ex) and they were worth it. They are as good as a book, not a time pass magazine, a book you can gift to someone and he will thank you for that and add it to library.
The only magazine that has maintained standard is Sandesh, quite interesting, most probably because its editors (the family of Satyajit Ray) did not need patrons to run it, it was still pleasing.
I wonder if the damage done by our ex vulture rulers will be undone, can be undone with time to come, where actually talented people will get chance to share their works in the magazines, but in today’s consumerist world I see slim chances, I read a lot of blogs, works and see it how quite a handful bloggers (cant call them writers) most probably buy the services (I get at least two mails, request selling likes, comments etc. on FB, BlogSpot, twitter, WP) and outshine the actually talented people, now those who are not serious readers will certainly go their way, thinking that they must have something that is why “everyone” is reading, that is a common herd mentality, so… I can hope but I really don’t see much chances of the damages done by those *** getting undone.
So much so for allowing corruption to rule for 30 years!
Indie Adda 