Dhan celebrates 11 years of ‘Namathu Mannvasam' magazine

The Hindu

6 days ago

Dhan Foundation in Madurai celebrated the 11th anniversary of their monthly Tamil magazine – 'Namathu Mannvasam' – here on Monday.
The magazine, retaining its unique identity, has kept up with its promise of promoting mostly new women writers and readers, said M.P. Vasimalai, Executive Director of Dhan Foundation.
As reading habit among students has gradually diminished, the magazine should produce engaging contents based on Tamil literature found only in bits and pieces in school syllabuses, he added.
When some of the important and essential Tamil literatures were present just as stand-alone poems in subject books, the students would barely think of reaching out to the whole work of literature, Mr. Vasimalai stated.
'By producing content in the form of story reading, the students, who are the target readers, could be largely engaged,' he added.
Further, speaking about the magazine's novel effort, he said that the writers who contributed to the magazine were mostly ground-level workers.
Through this, the magazine has proved that it could sustain the content that comes organically from working class people, he added.
Appreciating the tremendous hard work behind every published magazine, he said that publishing houses should also consider coming up with at least five translated works of writers which have hardly reached the public.
Madhan Kumar, of Padiparivu Pathipagam, said the magazine which was being published in Tamil, Kannada and Marathi, is to be expanded to other languages like Odia and Telugu.
'As a uniqueness of the magazine, of the 500 writers, 200 of them were women. Also, every year's March month edition would be a by-women and for-women edition,' he noted.
Adhering to the famous philosopher Antonio Gramsci's perspective about organic intellectual, he said, 'The magazine runs solely on the organic intellectuals - women writers also the field workers.'
Magazine's editor B. Thirumalai recalling the efforts of the magazine to continue its work during Covid-19 pandemic, said that even the mainstream magazines could not sustain during the critical few months of the pandemic.
'It was possible because of the readers who pushed us to expand our horizons out of our comfort zones,' he added.
Now, the aim of the magazine would be reaching 50,000 copies from the current 25,000 copies and their work in the following days would be towards that, he said.
During the event, a compilation of the 12 magazines was released.