Dear Readers,
Our third anniversary seems to have arrived faster than usual after this very tumultuous year! Our work at Ala kept us afloat as we all learned to navigate a pandemic norm; we hope our content was worth your generous and continuing support.
In our last editorial, we promised to diversify our content in the coming year. As part of this commitment, of the thirty contributors we featured this year, seven were works that featured illustrations or photography, and five were podcasts (also available on Spotify and Google Podcasts). We are gratified to be able to feature a more diverse range of exceptional contributors through these experiments in format. We thank you for your enthusiastic response and feedback.
In addition, this year saw Ala’s very first event, a two-day writing workshop held over two consecutive weekends. The aim was to guide a selected pool of participants in developing their ideas into popular writing. Our sessions were guided by members of the editorial team and featured the expertise of a few of our contributors and supporters (Nidhin Donald, Manmadhan Ullatil, and Ashok Chandran). They provided insight on the various stages involved—picking a topic, fleshing out an engaging narrative, editing, pitching to publishers, and promoting a published piece. We offered continued editorial assistance to all our participants, and encouraged them to submit to Ala if their topics related to Kerala. For this anniversary special issue, we are proud to feature the works of five talented and enthusiastic participants from our workshop, the aim of which was to support budding writers and thinkers in getting their ideas out to the world. We hope you will enjoy reading their work as much as we did!
This year, also gratefully welcomed onboard Zeenab Aneez, whose expertise in digital media engagement and journalism makes her an invaluable addition to our team which is now spread across three countries in three continents. Zeenab also dabbles in digital art—she designed the featured images for this issue and this editorial, putting together virtually our editorial team that has never once met in person!
For the coming year, we are gearing up for more exciting events and are working on some themed special issues in the pipeline. Both special issues and events help us cultivate more in-depth engagement with contributors and readers—we look forward to generative collaborations with research teams and organizations doing great work, and making this work accessible to a wider audience. Keep an eye out on our social media feeds or sign up for our newsletter to be a part of our community. As always, we eagerly look forward to your contributions and pitches. At Ala, anyone doing quality work on Kerala has a space.
For feedback, comments, or to pitch ideas, reach us at [email protected] or give us a shout-out on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
– Aparna, Hari, Shilpa, Sriram and Zeenab.
Wonderful!