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Positive Spaces: Call for Submissions

Kinaara magazine in collaboration with Open Space India seeks contributions to Positive Spaces, an anthology of fiction, articles, essays, photographs and artwork that emphasise and celebrate the aspects of unity and coexistence within the youth of South Asia and the diaspora.

About Positive Spaces

Positive Spaces is a campaign run by Open Space India in a number of Indian cities in 2009, with the aim to develop physical as well as symbolical spaces that are safe, diverse, inclusive and attentive to the ways in which hierarchies of class, caste, religion, sexuality, gender and ability work within the youth. The campaign has been carried out in campuses and public spaces through workshops, awareness sessions, theatre and other live performances and film screenings, and supported by organisations like Seagull Foundation for the Arts.

Launched in July 2009, Kinaara is a monthly online literary magazine for the youth in South Asia and the diaspora. Kinaara is a platform to facilitate experimentations in the literary and art forms, discussions on social issues and concerns and similar communication arising from all over South Asia and people who identify as South Asian.

The collaboration will result in a print anthology to be published in January 2010 and circulated to NGOs, universities, libraries and social studies organizations across South Asia and beyond.

Submission Details

• Contributors should be of or below the age of 30 years as on December 31, 2009.
  
  
• Contributions should pertain to the topics of contemporary South Asian life, society, arts, culture or youth, and emphasise the theme of positive spaces.
  
  
• Essays, articles and short fiction should be within the length of 800-1200 words.
  
  
• Poetry should be within the length of 80 lines.
  
  
• Photo features should contain a maximum of 10 photos. Original files are preferred.
  
  
• Art features should contain a maximum of 5 pieces, scanned at 300 dpi in the least.
  
  
• For mixed media work and/or work requiring specific formatting, the contributor is requested to get in touch with the Kinaara team.
  
  
• Contributors should agree to permit Kinaara to publish any submission unused for the print edition in subsequent online editions.

All submissions and queries should be directed to submit@kinaaramagazine.org.The last date for acceptance of submissions is November 30, 2009.

Editor circulation and other things

As our readers might have noticed, the selection for the September edition of Kinaara is Anomitra's. Rohit has decided to take over the October selection - with the theme Celebration - so look forward to that! If anyone's missing my editorship (hehe, how presumptuous), I'll be back in November.

Editor circulation we think is a fantastic idea. Each of us has very different tastes and opinions, so that in one way ensures that all kinds of material get the fair chance to be published. It also ensures a fair distribution of work pressure, since all of us are full-time students and do a great many other things (and don't get paid for Kinaara, remember). Rohit had been busy all through July and August. Anomitra is going on vacation at the end of this month, and I have more work right now than I've ever had before, which will continue till the end of November, I'm afraid. So it's a great thing for us that Rohit is back and taking charge of next month's edition. We all are working in bits and pieces, of course -- there's a lot of checking, proofreading, writing back to contributors etc. to be done which is never possible for just one person -- but this brings a great deal of relief.

Expect a newsletter in about a week's time, with what I'm right now calling the big news (and keeping my fingers very tightly crossed about). If you've never received a newsletter before and aren't sure if your email address is on the list, feel free to send us a shout at newsletter@kinaaramagazine.org.

Monidipa Mondal

A warm welcome to all the readers and supporters of Kinaara. Kinaara has grown from stregth to strength thanks to your love and support. We are pleased to announce that our September edition is out and can be accessed on our Website.

The submission due date for our October edition is 15 September and with Durga Puja, Diwali and Eid celebrations around the corner we decided the theme for this month will be Celebration.

The November issue is unthemed and submissions are solicited by 15 October.

I would also like to take this opportunity to tell our supporters that Kinaara is expanding from being just an online Magazine. We are currently in talks with Open Space, Pune and GYCA (Global youth coalition on aids) on future collaborations.
Watch this space for more.

Rohit K dasgupta
Assistant Editor

(On behalf of the Kinaara team)

Media updates yo!

It took us a while to collect all the links and photos, but here goes the long-awaited post. Firstly, photos from the launch of Kinaara on July 1.

Anomitra and yours truly at the Seagull Bookstore, just before people started coming in. We're just pretending that we're not nervous. Photo credits to Bedatri.

The panel discussion in progress. From left to right, Dr. Rimi B. Chatterjee, Dr. Kavita Panjabi, Mr. Oishik Sircar and Mr. Pratim D. Gupta. Photo credits to Pujarini Sen.

Part of the audience (the one with us in it; yes, we're narcissistic like that). You can see Anomitra, my head (but not the rest of me), Bedatri and Rohit, among others. Photo creds again to Pujarini.

The launch was reported on the city edition of the Hindustan Times and on The Telegraph in Schools, neither of which, interestingly, have a web edition; so there is no link.

However, there is this (rather ludicrous, I must say) coverage of Kinaara on the Indian Express. No, we're not a south-east Asian magazine really, and no, my surname isn't spelt like that, but I did say ludicrous, right? Rather more factually correct is the coverage in this week's Tehelka, which should be on your newsstands by today morning (at least if you're in India) and stay there for another week, so if you're interested in souveniers for the future you know where to look!

On a rather more serious note, the August edition of Kinaara has just been put up on our website. Go take a look, and tell us if you like what you see.

Monidipa Mondal

Barely survived!

Last night there was a spam attack on the Kinaara website. It might have started a while back, for who can post about 120 spam comments in one night's time? (Or maybe they can, you never know spambots!) It gave me quite a heart attack though, tech-retard as I am, because the website of the last online magazine I was part of had got attacked by a strange virus a few months back and never recovered. (I wasn't part of the team by then, so I didn't get to learn what exactly had happened, but I doubt if it would've made any difference to my tech-retard brain.)

So I panicked and nearly died.

Anyway, by now Chirag and I seem to have cleared up the problem, so all is well and I'm going to sleep peacefully at night. The October theme is Celebration, by the way. The deadline for that is September 15, as you guys must've got accustomed to. But before that is September, unthemed, and let's see the submissions!

August Issue: Conflict

This is an official call (and ill-disguised plea) to all readers and Kinaara supporters and enthusiasts to submit their thoughts on the subject in prose and verse to kinaaramail@gmail.com by the 15th of July. While physical and political forms are the more obvious forms of conflict, we're sure we shall some innovative takes on the topic as well. Don't disappoint us!

On behalf of the editorial team, which can hardly wait,

Rimi

25th June, 2009.