The idea of an e-magazine, with focus on multiple aspects of our rich cultural heritage, politics, philosophy, community news, views, people, community business promotion, networking, matrimonials,entertainment, new songs & videos and other such, originated in the middle of 2007. We are amazed at the pace the events have unfolded, converting those initial turbid perceptions into a reality.
The motivation for launching such an e-magazine, Shehjar, has been to promote KP issues of this decade and bring the diverse needs of our community in a format that is easy to read and navigate. Despite so many fine KP journals being published, the need was felt to bring a magazine that is different in flavor and caters to the needs of everyone, from a literary serious to a casual reader. However, it would not have been possible without enthusiastic support and words of encouragement from everyone we spoke to.
Conceived and designed to be an interactive online magazine to serve the large global Internet readership, Shehjar will appear at regular intervals. Its hosting website, kashmirgroup.com, will be ever active and responsive to readers, with features like discussion forum, news and readers’ feedback. We hope that you will find these features interesting and keep us busy with your participation. With a global membership database and subscription listof about 10,000 registered users/members in our group, the possibilities of immediate readership are limitless.
Though we intend to have speacial, theme based issues as well, we endeavor to put together an interesting mix of articles, poems and event sections in each issue. Every issue attempts to have a fair representation in terms of variety of content and subjects. A web based magazine does not have limitations with regard to the publishing of high quality multimedia content, like graphics, audios and videos etc. as compared to the traditional subscription-based print magazines that inherently lack some of these features.
Our web and graphic design teams toiled hard and long to meet the needs. We are grateful for their response, especially we are indebted to Mr. Arun Koul for his expertise. Thanks to our contributors for their interest and efforts in promoting this worthy cause. Thanks are also due to friends and well wishers for their invaluable suggestions.
While featuring writings from established writers, we are also introducing several budding writers and artists deserving to be read and heard, consistent with our objective of encouraging the upcoming talent in our community.
We need your input and enthusiastic contribution to make this e-magazine vibrant. It belongs to all of us and you are our associates in this new venture, in our quest of exploration. With your support and active involvement, we look forward to a most interesting future for ‘Shehjar’.
