Editorial of Volume 9 – First Online version

2011 started good for Silhouette!

We had dilly-dallied for some time with the web option of our magazine – whether to continue with a sluggish and expensive medium or not was the supreme question. Like many old associations, we were probably illogical in our defense of continuing with the print version. The smell of paper many say lure the publisher and his writers. It may well be so.

But it is just that only. Coping with a difficult Press-related activity with a shoe-string team and double-layered budget was too much to continue. Consider the waiting time for our esteemed authors, and that concludes the party.

So, here comes the Web Edition of Silhouette. Yes, we have finally done it. We start with Vol IX since that is what it actually is. Wonder where Vol VIII is gone, its doing its last rites in the Press and should be out for all to savour this very month. We will appropriately update our readers and authors when their agonizing delay for Vol VIII ends.

Now to some operational nuances which I felt is required here. Since we are on web henceforth, we will break one annual volume into four in the four quarters. We will try to upload quality articles as before but in smaller chunks of 5-6. This way our authors will have a controlled waiting period and reader feedback will also be near-real time.

This however doesn’t mean that we won’t have an annual topic. We will try to make the release fatter during the issue which will come out around the Kolkata Film Festival – in short, that issue is topical, rest all are miscellaneous. Again, we may think of having a parallel print version of that topical issue only after weighing the different cons more rationally.

We are currently hosting our matter in a not so state-of-the-art website. Our urgency to move to the web and let the ball roll again is the main reason for this. We will eventually move on to a better and more importantly, our own domain. We will try to leverage the web to churn out means to sustain our expenses. We have few ideas and we will try one and all of them. What we need, as always, is your sustained support.

Rest all – us and you and our silhouettes remain unaltered. The quest continues… but metaphorically, in a more virtual space.

Happy reading!

April 2011