Evening with Bombay Review

The Bombay Review editors, Kaartikeya Bajpai and Garima Pura

The Bombay Review, a bi-monthly online literary magazine with annual print anthologies of short fiction and poetry, is on a 13-city literary events tour across India and beyond. Before heading north for Dehradun, Chandigrah and Delhi, they will spend a literary evening with Mumbaikars, this Saturday.

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The Bombay Review editors, Kaartikeya Bajpai and Garima Pura

The events include interactions with aspiring writers and exchange of work and ideas. In Mumbai, The Bombay Review team has collaborated with Open Sky Slam, a group that organises art and poetry evenings, to present an evening of literary interaction. This would be followed by a session with filmmaker and crime fiction writer, Piyush Jha, who will talk about petty crimes in the city, as opposed to high profile crimes and how Mumbai becomes a character in his works of fiction.

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Piyush Jha

The magazine's editor, Kaartikeya Bajpai, also its co-founder, started the magazine while studying journalism at Symbiosis International University in Pune. Bajpai is excited about the way the project has shaped up. "I am thankful to my team back in India, who put their faith in the magazine and help it expand," he says.

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Bajpai, over email from New York, shares that the multi-city tour is not a first for the team of 50 members. The magazine's fiction editor, Aravind Jayan, is based in London and poetry editor Garima Pura is in Mumbai.

"We have conducted events in the past, and were on a three-city summer tour before this. Having events like these reinstates my hope in the book club culture that has faded in the last decade. It took us about two months to plan. We are going to Nigeria, UK and US too," he shares.

Jha is all praise for the magazine. "It is a very good initiative and I support it wholeheartedly. It is sad that very few young people read these days. Moreover, what they read does not add value to their lives. This initiative is about fiction that offers that value," he says.