20th anniversary issue

by Vijay Anand | Dec 14, 2022 | 0
I am writing this editorial with much excitement as Confluence has now reached an important milestone in its long literary journey. This is our 20th anniversary issue that comes as an expanded special issue. It brings a great deal of writings from our writers and many of them have been part of this long journey since my father Joe Nathan established this magazine in 2002. I would like to thank all those who accepted my invitation or heard about this special issue project, and sent their literary contributions for this issue. It gives me enormous pleasure to read their personal stories and the interesting conversations they had with my father, even though some of them had never met him in person or even heard his voice over the phone. In the very first editorial written by my father, he said ‘Confluence is about meeting of minds, a fusion of cultures. We are talking here about the South Asian diaspora in Britain and their growing influence and contribution to the British identity’. Even though his main focus at that time was on South Asian diaspora in Britain, after twenty years we see that this magazine has attracted more readers and writers from countries outside Britain. In fact, a majority of our readers and writers now come from further afield, I can tell. This trend shows the growing influence of Confluence among South Asian diaspora living all over the world. This is indeed good news for many of our writers too as they always want to attract a wider audience for their writings. During the past twenty years, Confluence has proved itself as a trusted and well respected literary platform for a variety of writers, poets, artists alike. Our Facebook writers’ group too has attracted hundreds of writers over the last few years and become a large writers’ family. Furthermore, Confluence has introduced numerous new but talented writers including several poets to the literary world by giving them free space in the magazine. Funding this magazine has always been a tough task but we keep appealing to various people and organisations to support this magazine and hope the situation will improve in the future. This year I was fortunate enough to travel to many parts of India and meet some of our regular writers in Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai. In addition, I was also introduced to some new writers who have indicated their desire to become our regular columnists. Since I took over this magazine eight years ago, Malathy has been providing editorial assistance despite her retired but busy life. My special thanks to her for her assistance over these years. However, it is becoming inevitable to have a more sophisticated editorial team as the scope of this magazine is widening as I could see. While I thank all our present and past contributors for writing for this magazine and supporting us in many ways, I wish all our readers, writers and well-wishers a happy holiday season and a very Happy New Year which we hope will bring peace, prosperity and good health to all of us. Happy reading of the special issue and will meet you all in another issue next year!