Editor's Note

"This month's issue of Forum is our twelfth, bringing to a close the first year of publication as a monthly following our re-launch late last year. In our first twelve months of existence, thanks to you, our readers, we feel that we have succeeded in establishing Forum as the premier "think" magazine in the country and are very gratified at the positive response from the reading public.

We have striven to provide you with the biggest names in Bangladeshi political commentary, from Rehman Sobhan to Kamal Hossain to Afsan Chowdhury to Akbar Ali Khan to Sharmeen Murshid to Imtiaz Ahmed. The list could go on.

In addition, we have attempted to provide a platform for an entire generation of young writers and thinkers such as Farid Bakht, Naeem Mohaiemen, Asif Saleh, Jyoti Rahman, Tazreena Sajjad, and many more, whose ideas we hope will help shape the Bangladesh of the 21st century and whom we hope will be seen in the pages of Forum for many years to come.

From outside Bangladesh, we have worked hard to bring you writers of the calibre of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Tariq Ali, Ahmed Rashid, Prem Shankhar Jha, C. K. Lal, Larry Jagan, Martin Woollacott, and M. Shahid Alam, and we look forward to continued collaboration with such thinkers to prove that a Bangladeshi magazine can attract the world's finest talents to its pages.

Every issue of Forum as been filled with original, exclusive commentary and analysis of great insight and acuity, together with top-notch reportage and in-depth feature pieces that you will not have found anywhere else.

In addition, we have been proud to play host to the top names in literary and cultural criticism such as Kaiser Haq, Fakrul Alam, and Syed Manzoorul Islam, as well as newer talents to watch out for such as Rubaiyat Hossain and Abeer Hoque.

Moving forward, we hope to beef up our literary and cultural sections, make fiction and non-fiction prose and poetry a regular feature, and continue to solicit pieces that are must-reads for those who want to stay fully informed and be part of the discussion as to the direction this country is heading, politically, economically, and socially.

We will continue to show-case the finest of the nation's photography talent, and look forward to continuing to bring you the best of Bangladesh, old and new, as well as a steady stream of top pundits from outside the country as well.

We hope that we can continue to improve. When we re-launched Forum, we were betting that Bangladesh was ready for this kind of magazine, and your continuing interest has proved this is so. Now it is up to us to make Forum better and grow into a publication that can hold its own with any in the world. We like to think that, with your help, we have made a decent start.