When I assumed the Honorary Editorship of New Quest effectively from Number 147, I was five years younger than I am now, and all I thought I needed to do was to identify and inspire people to succeed me and leave me alone to complete lifelong projects that had been my priority.

Bringing out one 80-page issue per quarter did not seem an insurmountable task. I even dreamt of winning new contributors and subscribers, getting adequate advertising support and finding financial patronage to make this journal self-supporting.

I have to admit that I have been proven wrong on most of these counts. Re-inventing New Quest has been a series of doubtful experiments; doubtful because there has been little or no feedback from readers on the changes we sought to bring about in the editorial policy.

I attached an optimistic tag to describe New Quest as a quarterly journal of participative inquiry into society and culture. It had the hopeful implication and expectation that readers would debate and discuss everything we publish, evaluate the creative writing and the translations we carry, and eventually turn into active contributors to what the journal tries to reflect.

New Quest is already heavily subsidized and 360 pages per annum for just Rs. 150 does not seem a practical price in the absence of advertising and grants to underwrite the cost of production. Why, then, are we unable to expand our subscriber base beyond the miserable figure of 600, inclusive of institutions and public libraries?
We need just four full-page advertisements per issue to meet our cost of production and be able to pay at least a token honorarium to our contributors. This has not yet happened. Our Editorial Board works without any honorarium though each issue makes varying demands on their time. In short, they pay us in terms of time and professional consultation.

The unsolicited contributions we receive are read carefully by members of our Editorial Board who select the best in terms of content and presentation. Very often, we find the presentation full of flaws ranging from typographical glitches and grammatical errors to idiomatic lapses and stylistic opacity. Many of the articles and translations need to be laboriously copy- edited .

We expect the creative writing sent to us to be self-edited by poets and authors and we have neither the inclination nor the time to engage in any correspondence with them.

One of the key changes I have tried to bring about is in the notion of the addressee that many of our academic contributors have. Our readership does not exclude fellow-academics and experts or specialists. However, our larger and potential readership consists of intelligent lay persons with wide social and cultural interests. They are neither the colleagues nor the students of our authors. This should be borne in mind by our contributors because it defines our editorial policy and communication philosophy.

If our plans for the near future materialize, we would have a website and an electronic edition of New Quest within the next three months. This is not an alternative to our print edition but rather an advertisement for it. It will also feature an archive.

Due to budgetary constraints, we were compelled to move from Mudra to a relatively small printer. Mudra was associated with us from NQ 147 to NQ
165-66 and they helped us give the journal a new visual identity. Our ex-officio Art Director, and head of Mudra, Sujit Patwardhan, coped with our demands despite his other preoccupations. I take this opportunity to thank him and also to welcome his successor, Sandip Sonavane. Sandip, like Sujit, is both a printing technologist and a fine artist. NQ 167 appears with his signature on the cover design, layout, and typography.

I would, in the end, like to draw the attention of all readers and contributors to the fact that our business office in Mumbai will handle our subscription and mailing-related correspondence while the Editorial Board and myself will handle only the editorial correspondence and submissions. We prefer electronic submissions, supported by hard copies. We have no arrangements with the printer to typeset hard copies and proofread them. The editorial board proofreads and copy edits the entire contents of the issue and we communicate with one another electronically. We cannot afford to do otherwise on a shoestring budget.

Dilip Chitre