Those were the Chandamama Days

Can you see some kind of pattern in this madness? We all are so excited to tell our childood stories that we have started discussing things much broader that we originally thought. My personal opinion about this is quite positive. I think we should start talking about everything and anything surrounding our childhood.

Reshma has been one of the most active whistle blowers in this blog. Let us the give her the credits (I am not that bad with this language anyways). One thing she has been talking about recently was Chandamama and that really took me back to those days. I was a coincidence that a month back I rememberd of Chandamama. Like any other Google-holic I quickly tried to search through the net to figureout if they still exist. To my surprise the first result on Google took me to the home page of the publishers www.chandamama.org. They still are publishing in 11 Indian languages. Salute to the publishers who have been entertaining and educating Indian children with our cultural values through its stories.

I remember those days when we used to wait for Chandamama to reach by post. I was subscribing to the Oriya version (which is my mothertoungue). The first story I used to read as soon as the mazine lands in our house was Vikram & Betaal. Remember the picture on the story? It was the same picture in every issue but somehow it carried so much of excitement.

In general, along with the stories, the pictures on Chandamama were so very fascinating and expressing. Each picture was worth a story. The imperfect nature of the images gave them a feeling of closeness. I remember some new magazines started to break the monopoly of Chandamama by soeing up with better paper quality and more perfect looking images. But somehow they did not succeed. Yes Chandamama slowly lost its charm with the new age kids. But it certainly remains one of the foremost impressions of storytelling with people born in that era. I personally cherish the moments I used to spend peeking out of the window in the afternoon to see if the postman came with the latest edition of Chandamama.