There are people of a certain vintage, children of the 1980s and 90s, who remember an English children’s magazine called Target . In our ho...
There are people of a certain vintage, children of the 1980s and 90s, who remember an English children’s magazine called Target. In our house, we were enthusiastic readers of Target. We didn’t get much else Indian fare. For that, there were stories and novels in Bengali. But in English we read Enid Blyton, the classics, and Tintin. Into this world, came Target like a breath of fresh air.
Here there were stories written by familiar sounding names – Sigrun Srivastava, Ruskin Bond, Margaret Bhatty. In the pages of Target I saw comics by Ajit Ninan and it was here that I first met the writer Subhadra Sen Gupta. Her stories, often mixing food and history, had children with names just like ours. They lived in Delhi or Lucknow, and had fantastic adventures even in these places. Who knew that was possible!
The ’80s rolled by, and my days of reading Target fell by the wayside. The magazine quietly folded into other teen publications, and eventually disappeared. I was too busy with life to notice that gradual slipping away. And then, some time in the early 2000s, in a publishing office in Delhi, I met a Target writer in real life.
As an editor working for the children’s imprint of Penguin,...
