From the Editor's Sony PCG-SR5K


song above by Vidya Rao

Boy!, did I go out on a limb last time with all the babble of being focused a wee bit ahead of our times or what?

Six months on however, I do feel vindicated to some degree on several counts within the peculiar landscape that we're growing (with this gazette presently) as "The IDEA". The first count is of course that feedback from individuals and organizations whose opinions and guidance we particularly esteem encourages us evermore to continue with the endeavour. A second good reason has been that our steady global extension now has us slowly connecting with more and more of the sort of people who're able to arrive at a quicker understanding of what the idea of The IDEA is all about.

One result of this is that, as compared with the earlier two gazettes, we've widened global content a tad on this one while also reducing Indian content. It does sadden one though that the latter decline has partly to do with our continuing to expect a certain small measure of special effort and involvement from artists we feature. As far as I'm concerned, this has from the very beginning been a matter of being counted alongside folks who have proven gracious, generous in sharing, and eminent in achievement.

The attitude, we hope, will be amply expressed by the abundance of trivial materials we've been carelessly sent or been guided to on the internet by artists (i.e. some of you), which we have NOT included on this gazette. As you will find, this has mainly impacted music and animation content, which in turn has provided us the delightful opportunity to reproduce a few music features from the 1st IDEA gazette (January -June 2000), with reprocessed audio files. (the earlier files did not play back in some audio-players)

A third count on why I'm pleased to have walked out on the limb with my edit six months ago is that a new general-interest CD-ROM magazine did indeed surface in India a couple of months after that, by the name "The Virtual Mahazine" (see Contents). As some of you in India know, this operates a model pretty close to what I'd suggested in my editorial as the sort of stuff we should be soon seeing as other manifestations of the particular new-media continuum we believe ourselves to also be evolving with The IDEA.

In fact, several of the individuals and organizations receiving our gazette have absolutely delighted us by sending back fascinating CD-ROMs of all sorts of their own! As before, The IDEA is in fact again the sum of such parts to a very great degree, but while content has always been largely exclusive and/or "tailor-made", we've also overviewed some 'commercial' CDs for the first time this time. These were given me personally by co-participants at a recent conference I attended in Pune, India, which went by the title "National Conference on Multimedia Technology for Culture" (see Contents).

All of this loops back in turn to beliefs I've expressed earlier on this page ~ of a very rapidly emerging Creative Era dawning everywhere around us, when all individuals shall be Empowered Creative Individuals capable of doing and creating all sorts of presently inconceivable things. In line with this, we're happy to now have an audio-editor aged 13, who most conveniently happens to be my own son, Bacchus Barua. Bax has now had a MIDI keyboard for just over a year, and has made acceptable progress to our mind. Accordingly, aside from shouldering the responsibility of giving audio tools and gizmos a workout, vetting submissions and selecting music and e-musicians to feature, he provides background music for some of the features in this gazette in the form of "drafts-in-progress" awaiting finishing, lyrics and song.

As far as I'm concerned, human life with technology will never again be just about what it just seems to be ~ it'll always forevermore be about what can be, what should be, and what -eventually and en passant as all else in the continuum- will be.

In a way, that too is the idea of The IDEA.