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Merry Christmas!

And also the right time to say goodbye to another year in a short life that is a mere pile-up/ series/accumulation of such vanishing numbers, often caught and preserved in some words and pictures, as memorabilia, personal and sometimes of some value, in case of artistic or other iconic histories, for their fans!

Setu wishes its readers a Happy New Year and bids a fond bye to the year gone by; lapsed, yet forming a temporal continuum, a sequential line, in the relentless march of Time, leaving imprints on the sands of well, time!

We could gather so much of top friends during our brief journey so far, done from the two disparate locations---Mumbai and Pittsburgh. And happy to serve the expanding base of the refined patrons---majority of them being writers from many parts of the world and therefore, fellow travelers in this journey in aesthetic realms, through the fellowship of words and visuals---by a careful selection of rich and relevant content, served faithfully, month after month, by the leanest team---mainly two editors doing their day jobs, then majorly doing the editing and uploading the two independent issues of the e-zine; a demanding mission that gives a high to the duo, otherwise catholic in their overall tastes.

And there are no regrets for this unpaid labour, kinda volunteer service to the field due to the very nature of work involved---uplifting!

Sunil Sharma

It is exhilarating!

Paid jobs tend to turn the folks into hacks. Same jobs rendered on your own tend to be liberating.

And serving arts is our collective mission at Setu or otherwise in individual lives.

This year-end issue, we feature Charles Dickens’s immortal tale on Christmas, a source of delight to readers worldwide; a story of deep moral transformation; a classic that speaks to the reader of every age and era.

Also, the mesmerizing poem by John Keats on Homer and his reaction to the blind seer who could see things that even the sighted cannot.

Gems from the past, still glowing.

These holy texts are incentives to revisit our shared cultural heritage and revive a golden tradition of narration, now lost in the din of the market and its sales pitch and hunger for maximum profits. These retrospective readings challenge the formulaic of the current literary spaces and the glib market-determined stuff being promoted mindless through media industry globally by a clever PR tamasha and Fests-circuits.

Another notable: The Vinatge Setu. We will be retrieving some of the best from the archives for their great vintage value. Again worth visiting them for their innate beauty and sublimity. Rob Harle's piece does that only.

Rest of the features continues to provide a sumptuous feast to the soul yearning for freshness of content, no-conformist, serious, showing promise of a new dawn on the horizon, to be glimpsed soon.

Best of the next year...and reading to all of you, dear family and friends,

Sunil Sharma,

Editor,

Setu, English

Setu, December 2017