The first issue of the E-Journal is on "Cityscapes".

It attempts  to explore how cultural translation has been the way of life in the city as a region. There are many strands to the culture of any region. The socio-political-cultural matrix of any city is inextricably mangled , yet each category also requires its individual space. A city with its multi-ethnic groups qualify for a potpourri culture, where the subcultures and para cultures constantly contradict, subvert each other even as they look for a harmonizing, homogenizing factor. Any metropolis, would have a history of cultural configurations, sub-cultural specificities of regions within region and political contestations. So the cultural sensibility or consciousness of a region can have divergent perspectives. With global cities and increasing multiplexes, plazas and internationalized spaces, there is a simulacrum at work and yet that is still a snapshot of  a certain privileged cross section of the society which have economic viability to participate in that drama of the “modernized” world. Interesting are the cases of such cities which treasure the heritage buildings, the culture of yore and at the same time are a part of that global internationalized space. The coffee hubs, the food courts, the mobile rage, the spin, rush and run  of the technological savvy generation, often times are muted with the ruins of yore, reminding us of a different time, different space, different narrative.

And yet again, the cities which have sprung up bearing the stamps of numerous colonies, cultures and technological revolutions, are jarring in their globalized perspective. A lost language, a lost culture, a hybrid consciousness, a total “chutnification” of the processes of history, render them as more intriguing.

As home is where we live, we have several cities jostling within us, several cultures, several identities, several selves, several refractions and reflections of deflected desire to be one and which is never one. Cities are our memory-scape(s), cities are our internationalized scape, cities are holograms of desire, cities are changeable, fractured identities. Cities are polyphonic voices in our head, which never allows for rest. Cities always explode the monadic into a thousand cultural histories, all mangled in the mindscape.

This issue, attempts to explore the city as a cultural text, containing within it the various other subtexts of creative desire through stories, music, art, photography and attempts at a mosaic of sorts or a collage of  urban life, with its overlapping cultural contours,  across nations and its socio-political histories.