Growing Up With Anandamela
Anandamela is a well-known, and well-loved, Bengali children's magazine. It used to publish some of the best children's writing in Bengali during the late 70's, 80s and the 90s. Today, the quality has somewhat declined, especially after they split the original magazine into two - one catering to "children" and the other to "young adults". I don't know how much this exercise has been successful. It did not succeed with Target, another pioneering children's magazine, which tried the same experiment by becoming more "teen-focused" and ended up killing the whole thing. But I digress. Anandamela - translated literally - means "fair of joy". My introduction to Anandamela was the Puja annual issue of 1989. The Puja issue is much fatter than the regular magazine, and it's published during Durga Puja/Dussehra. For the 10 year old me, it was like a gateway to another world. My reading material at that time consisted mostly of m...