Two tea-travel-book posts … that became an article in www.springmagazine.net - an online journal for students of English Literature …

Whenever I link my blogposts on Facebook, I get some kind of response … I get ‘like’-s and sometimes also comments … I do look forward to these responses … and there are some of my friends who support me almost always by ‘liking’ my posts and by sometimes by buoying me up through comments … Shubha, my cousin, is one such supporter … and KBS Krishna is another, especially after I started writing about my encounters with crime fiction, more so with my recent obsession with ‘hardboiled’ detective fiction (all those Macdonald posts!!) …  Krishna was my contemporary at CIEFL and if I am not wrong, belonged to the first ever batch of MA students … now he teaches at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh … we got chatting after some time about crime fiction and it was then that he told that he worked on ‘hardboiled’ detective fiction for his PhD … aaha …

Anyway … so, one day he asked me if he could use my posts for an online magazine that he was planning … this was the first time somebody was asking permission to use my posts … I was curious and asked him for details … he wanted an article that he was planning to put under the title ‘closet classics,’ books that should have been widely known, but have remained hidden for various reasons … he seemed to like my posts on travel books on my blog … and wanted to merge two reviews that had similar themes (sort of…) and make one article … So, Krishna took my posts on Bishwanath Ghosh’s ‘Chai, Chai’ and Rishad Saam Mehta’s Hot Tea Across India and did some editing and all that and also gave a title, Wake up and Smell the Tea, to the merged article …

And this article appears in the first issue of Spring Magazine on English Literature … when I saw the link for the magazine in my mail, I was happy that finally something came out of my blog after all these years of writing … ha ha ha … and when I read the contents of the first issue, I was really pleased … Krishna, as the Editor-in-Chief, has brought out a magazine that puts English literature in the hands of students and young researchers … a literature magazine that doesn’t scare away students … a non-intimidating student-friendly magazine … my sincere hope is that the Spring Magazine stays this way for many more years to come … and friends, please pass the word around … this magazine deserves a wider audience … and thanks Krishna for liking my tea book posts …

Haan … this is the chai article … Wake up and Smell the Tea  by yours truly ...