Acronym is an ‘acronym’ for A Concise Reduction Of Nomenclature Yielding Mnemonics. Don’t bother to check the dictionary. I already did several years ago when we were debating on a title for The Ivory Tower.
Yes, The Ivory Tower was the title we eventually settled into and yes there were two of us who formed the ‘we’ in the previous sentence and yes one of it is me and yes the other one is ‘my friend’ whom I promised in the last post to ‘explain’ in the next post.
I repeat in this post, “Let him wait until the next post to get explained.”
[One has to keep one’s word. Otherwise, like rabid dogs, they bite the unprepared!]
Now, let us move on with this acronym thing that I know is beginning to interest you.
Once we embarked on our self-styled, type-written, cyclostyled, freely polluting, never-popular, never-green, revolutionary magazine, we discussed, on many an animated evenings, numerous issues related to magazine publication like target readers (how many gullible friends we have), production cost (which of our parents should pay), selling cost (which of our gullible friends parents should pay it back), freedom of press (is sex allowed in the magazine), and the contents (is copying legal and moral in a non-copyrighted magazine?).
We calculated (Sony Calculus FX280) our target audience from our respective colleges and common friends as about 5280 in the first week. After many deliberations in the general body meetings conducted between the two of us, reduced it to about 273 in the second week. Subsequently it was zeroed to 25 plus a few of our relatives. The relatives are not our friends but could shell out some money to escape our demands to read our magazine. Owing to the above mentioned number of target audience and the philanthropy of a few of them, the production and selling cost nicely balanced on the fence (remember, we already had the typewriter and enough spare ribbons), at least for the first few issues.
Anyway, the magazine, just like our friendship after the first few years, diffused into nonchalance after these first few issues. But I am jumping the story.
As far as freedom of press is concerned, ‘my friend’ would rather kiss a frog that could turn into a princess and discusses philosophy at nights. And I had hardly kissed a girl, if not a princess who talks philosophy. Freedom of press was limited in those days.
For the contents of the magazine we had many ideas, many of which borrowed, but upon enough discussions, sounded original. We thought of taking notes of a lecture series by Some-Ananda or the other for the benefit of the misdirected youth who weren’t allowed to kiss but discussed philosophy. Also perhaps some episodes of Pranoy Roy’s current affairs TV show could be cyclostyled to bemoan what the World is coming to. We had articles lined up that talked about the moral high and low grounds of (non)smoking, (ab)use of *#@% and other $%^& that were expurgated in social tête-à-tête, whether to return a handshake or say namaskar, why we laugh or cry when we want to, should we attend quiz programs which ‘merely’ help one pick up girl/boy friends but otherwise are camouflaged memory retention contest used for adolescent one-upping.
The list was endless.
