Thursday, January 10, 2008

The youth magazine of our times

When I was a teen (not so long ago :-) ) we had a magazine called the Junior Statesman ( later abbreviated to the JS). It brought a lot of excitement in our lives. We subscribed for it and every week would wait for the magazine to be delivered . You may wonder why the special mention of this magazine? The last post that I made has a reference to Jug Suraiya who incidentally was an important part of JS. I wonder how old he is now. Definitely older than I for sure. There was so much to read and many contests to participate in . (I won a second prize for completing a poem and also a drawing. And in the process received Rs 15 & 10 by money order as the prize! - big money for a teen!)
Every issue had a letter to the editor by Papiya and Tuk Tuk Ghosh, who we all believed were imaginary till a couple of months ago there was a small news item which said that Papiya Ghosh a famous historian in Bihar was killed by some real estate sharks. And her sister Tuk Tuk was an IAS officer. I missed the news item, but had a mail from a friend asking me to look it up. I am sure there were many sad JS readers that day.
A nice article on JS is the one written by Sashi Tharoor. As he writes, the magazine was born at a time when the only channel on TV was Doordarshan (with their agriculture programs). JS reached out to all us young teens. The language was so simple and so unlike the stuff that is printed today. If it were to resurface today, I am sure that no teen would ever leaf through it. They would probably find it boring and instead reach out for the trash that is brought out as intelligent reading material for the youth of today.

Sadly I read that trash too for lack of anything better!

1 comment:

  1. thanks radha...That was nice, i still remember the many issues of JS. did not know about the tharoor article as well..

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