Come September and I would wait
eagerly for the special editions of the magazines slated to be published during
the festive season. These magazines, puja shonkhya, as they are known as, would
take up majority of the time of my pre-pujo days.
It started with the special
editions of the children like Anandamela, Sandesh, and Sukhtara with an
occasional dose of Kishore Bharati. These were mostly adventure stories and
comics aimed at the psyche of the growing child and they had wonderful authors
who wove magic through their word imagery.
With age, I have graduated to the
more commonly known Puja Shankya for the grown ups like Desh, Anandabazar ,
Patrika, Bartaman, and Anandalok ,too. Each year the newspaper vendor would
deliver these by mid September and then on every free time between meetings or
in the back seat of my car or Sundays would be spent in the joys of reading
through myriad stories printed there.
I have always found the authors
depicting present reality through these stories and events were woven round the
‘in things’ at that time, save a few ‘period pieces’. I have seen class
struggle being the base of the majority of such stories in the early eighties.
Cricket heroes replaced football heroes as a protagonist of the stories after one
Sourav Ganguly proved that even the ‘mach bhat khaoa Bangali’ can play cricket
at the very highest levels. A couple of years back many stories had ‘land acquisition’ as the backdrop.
The moot point is that I have
found that these stories are a veiled attempt at contemporary social
commentary.
Of late, specially this year , I
have found graphic descriptions of sex, lesbianism and seduction in a majority
of the stories.
Are we becoming adults or is the
social fabric, as we knew it, going for a makeover? Or have the authors
realised that sex sells? What say?
