Why JS Magazine Would Never Work With Today's Generations
Key Highlights :
To its readers, JS was a cult. They waited all week to devour every word of the magazine, and its issues were eagerly anticipated and avidly read. But why would such a magazine never work with today's generations?
Desmond Doig, the editor of JS, was born in 1921 in either Allahabad or Patna, depending on which website you believe. He edited the magazine from 1967 to 1977, and it was known for its irreverent and fun approach to writing, puns, and journalism. During its heyday, the magazine perfectly suited the young, counterculture Indian of that time, committed to making love with flowers rather than wars with guns, while outrageously disguised in bell bottoms, face paint and long hair.
Today, however, the world is a very different place. Gen Z and Millennials have grown up in the age of the internet, and are used to emojis, disappearing messages, and corporate influencers. Reading is no longer the priority it once was, and reality often competes with Photoshop. With the way people consume media today, a magazine like JS simply wouldn't work.
The rise and fall of JS was a meteoric one, and the few copies extant today come with high price tags as collector’s items on eBay. But thanks to the efforts of one man, almost all of the JS issues are now available in digital form. Z, not his real name, worked for a period in the Mumbai offices of The Statesman, and came upon 11 old, bound volumes of JS. As he began reading, he came under the spell that had captivated an entire generation.
Convinced that a treasure would be lost if every page of JS was not carefully archived, Z was overcome by a sense of mission. He smuggled out issues, volume by volume, one at a time, to get each page photocopied. He managed to get a photocopy shop to agree to just a rupee a page, in addition to working extra hours every evening, and it took him eight days to create a digital archive of almost all the JS issues available.
The remaining issues, encoded as a zip file, were donated by Z to a Kolkata university, to be preserved in safe custody for posterity. But the question remains: is posterity even interested?
It would seem not. C R Irani, the man who had shut down JS, got in touch with a former employee, asking if he was interested in re-starting the magazine as editor. The answer was a resounding no. A magazine like JS, whose readers waited to hungrily eat up every word on every page, has no place in today's world.
This is evidenced by the fact that four years before JS, in 1963, another youth magazine took shape in Allahabad, Desmond Doig’s birth city. Called The Teenager, its founders were Italian expatriates, Fr. Maurus and Fr. Rego. Though JS closed down in 1977, The Teenager, renamed Teenager Today, is still published in print and online versions. It’s India’s oldest surviving youth magazine, at 60 years.
The story of JS is a fascinating one, and it's a shame that it would never work with today's generations. But it's reassuring to know that its legacy lives on in the digital archive created by Z, as well as in the Teenager Today magazine.
