Comments on time that stay timeless
As a Freelance Columnist
Reflections and discussions on issues in the rainbow light of intuitive feelings.
Manoj Das s freelance columns began with the Thought, a weekly started by M.N. Roy, the Radical Humanist leader and later edited by Ram Singh. Manoj Das contributed to it a weekly column regularly for about two years in the late sixties, on current literary and cultural events. For a short span of time, he wrote a column for the Milestone, published from Hong Kong. After doing a column 'On the Tides of Time' for The Times of India from time to time, he did a regular weekly column for The Hindustan Times, entitled 'The Banyan Tree' that became highly popular, in the seventies of the last century. He had to discontinue it when Chandamama Publications launched The Heritageunder his editorship. After five years of uninterrupted publication, this prestigious monthly, despite commanding a large circulation, closed down because of its policy of refusing to accept advertisements that were not in keeping with its content. Thereafter he wrote a fortnightly column called 'The Tides of Time' for The Hindu for a little over two years.
In the world of Odia journalism he was probably the first regular freelance columnist. If there were regular columns earlier, they were written by staffers. He began in the mid-sixties of the last century with Janashakti and later wrote for the Dharitri, the Samaj, the Sambad and a weekly guest-editorial for the Anupam Bharat. All these short features were so well received that, compiled into a few volumes of books, they have undergone several reprints.
Moments transfigured: Picks from newspaper columns
- (1) A Courier For the World Beyond
- (2) A Night to Remember
- (3) All Statues have feet of clay
- (4) Chasing the Golden Deer
- (5) Darkness :Made in India
- (6) English as she spoke
- (7) Irresistible Identity
- (8) Is This Anger Mine
- (9) Jubilation of the Bald Parrot
- (10) Niagra: the turbulent and the tranquil
- (11) Passages on India
- (12) Pleasing the planets
- (13) Royalties of Valmiki and Vyasa?
- (14) The Cult and The Occult
- (15) The day Mirra met her Krishna
- (16) The Fading Taj
- (17) The India You Do Not Know: ODISHA
- (18) The Measure of Murasaki
- (19) The Poetry of history
- (20 The Unclaimed hostage
- (21) Undoing the mischief of the Demi-God