Do you feel younger writers should be writing for Chandamama?
You could be 60 and still write for the young. Take Ruskin Bond for example. I would say you have to be `cool' to be writing for the young.
Our competition is not with any other magazine but with time - the amount of time a child is going to spend in consuming non-academic stuff. Children have so many things to do and in that time, I want them to read Chandamama too.
Did you talk to today's children about what they want to read in Chandamama?
We have been bringing children to our office, but not to answer any questionnaire. I want them to talk to me. We had these two girls from Bangalore Bishop Cotton School, and one of them told me, `It's nice but I won't read it'. She then asked me, 'Do you have one friend named Yagyavakhya in your 43 years of life?'
I told my team, let's make the change but gradually.
When we were young, Chandamama was a person, it was like a mother to us. But even today, Chandamama is the same, our mother and our children's grandmother. It should be our children's mother, and not their grandmother.
Today, a mother talks to her children about computers, how to be safe on the internet, how to be safe on Orkut, how to deal with other personal problems, etc. But Chandamama doesn't talk about all that. If you have to be relevant to today's children, you should address the issues they face today.
An illustration from Chandamama
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