IIT Kharagpur students launch Bengali magazine

KOLKATA: They constitute some ofIndia’s best scientific brains who would soon head out to work inmultinational firms across the world. But if science is their life, literatureand music are their passion. And it’s a feeling that their jeans clad,jet-setting peers have begun to loath their mother tongue and neglect their ownculture - that has spurred these young engineers into action.A group of30-odd students of IIT Kharagpur have set out on a mission to ‘reigniteand revive every Bengali’s love for his mother tongue’ by launchinga biennial news magazine in Bengali with an aim to ‘save thelanguage’. “IIT has a mixed culture of different languages,religions and rituals. But unfortunately, though it is in the midst of WestBengal, Bengali is one of the most neglected (and sometimes most hated)language. Some of us who love our own mother tongue are trying to resist thisaggression. We have a Bengali drama group named BTDS (Bengali TechnologyDramatic Society) which stages plays throughout the year. Ajantrik is our latesteffort - a magazine published and totally funded by students,� editor ofthe magazine, outgoing electrical engineering student Avik Sarkar toldTNN.Avik and his friends Somangshu and Debashis, Soumya, Tirthajyoti,Sudip, Shubhadeep, Saurav and Dipanjan have successfully published three issuesof the magazine so far with some help from professors like Uday Chattopadhyay.The next issue is due in October. The magazine also doubles as a webzine and canbe seen at www.ajantrik.8m.net. In the editorial of the inaugural issue,the editors made their intentions clear, “You are not a Bengali but a‘Bong’. You don’t have an iota of interest in Bengali cultureand you are extremely suspicious about the future of Bangla and the Bengalirace.....But why blame you. The education system celebrates mediocrity, theadministration sleeps, offices reek of dirty politics. The once successfulcommercial films are all but dead. 93 per cent of sign boards don’t have asingle Bengali word on them.