From the Editor's desk-top:
[click here if you do not hear music]

To many of the wonderful folks who teamed-up virtually ~and so wholeheartedly~ to produce this first gazette of "The IDEA," what's been most fascinating about it all, all along, has been the very idea itself!

Targetted essentially towards networking e-artists around India (and in time, the world), what we hope to have modestly got going here is a continuously-evolving platform for in-your-face review, interaction and evolution, right at the cutting-edge of tech-driven creative media into the future. After all, it's eventually all about goings-on going on everywhere around us anyway on this shrinking old lonely planet today [just hit the e-mail link up top any time to get in touch,.. involved].

Technologically, it could perhaps be said by some that we didn't quite walk the edge this first time around, and yes, I'll admit to some responsibility for having restricted the participants in many ways. Also, a lot of time wasted in trying to hammer comprehension into wood didn't help either,... but then hey ~ it's a happening thing right?

Remember how awesome computers seemed to be to so many of us just five years ago, and then compare that to how silly they now so often seem to be ~ perennially in a condition from which "If Only You Just Got This, Or U-P-G-R-A-D-E-D That,.. you could do/see/be so much more!

The immediate example before us is of course that your system needs to be configured very closely to mine to ideally experience this CD. And yet, there's no end to all of the streams of human preoccupation and endeavour that have ALREADY been hugely empowered "wholesale" by the dumb things.

Take me for instance:- first saw a computer up close about six years ago, peering pop-eyed over a friend's shoulder as he conducted "magic" on the monochrome screen of an XT without even a hard-disk aboard! Since then, I've moved on to my own sixth computer now, and DTP / Imaging / even Digital-Video and Music have all come to hand ~ just like has happened with so many of you too, along your own streams of work and interest (not to forget top-management with their lil' ole "PPT" movies here!).

In my case of course, there's more to it. For example, the music on several of the general pages of this gazzette were made on the computer pictured at left, with guitar laid over using the audio-cassette device at right. The piece playing in the background with this page is in fact the first I've ever made entirely on a PC (please be patient with it),.. and somewhere behind a couple of other pages are the two first computer-based songs made at about the same time (mid-1999) by our 12-year old son, Bacchus.

... and check out all of the good folks featured on this gazette and just look, just listen!!,.. and pardon audio-hiss (if any) just this first time around.

The perspective we're plugging here is that as time rolls along, the bottomline we're all working up towards into this dawning creativity-age is quite simply that you'n'you'n'you'n'you too can all make magic,.. turn up a better idea ~ a "Great!" idea.

... 'cause there's a billion of you out there.

Yea!
Shankar Barua
December 20, 1999