O Manase
O Manase is a Kannada-language fortnightly youth magazine published in Bengaluru, Karnataka. Its title means O Mind, and it was created to address young readers directly: their difficulties, troubles, relationships and place in popular culture. The magazine's chief executive and editor was the journalist and writer Ravi Belagere, one of the most recognisable figures in modern Kannada popular journalism, who founded it after the success of his weekly tabloid Hai Bangalore. Published by Bhavana Prakashana, O Manase appeared in print and on the web, and older issues were made available online, giving the fortnightly a life beyond its original paper circulation.
Meaning and Purpose
The name O Manase, O Mind, announces the magazine's method. Rather than addressing young people as students, consumers or voters, it addressed the inner life: anxiety, ambition, love, family pressure, failure and self-respect. Reference accounts state the founding purpose plainly. After the success of Hai Bangalore, Belagere started a magazine which focused on the difficulties and troubles of young people, and it too was an instant success. Simpler summaries of his career describe the same territory as youth issues and personal development. The WorldNM description of the magazine, a Kannada fortnightly youth magazine from Bengaluru focused on young readers, relationships and popular culture, reflects that combination of the personal and the popular.
A youth magazine in Kannada was itself a statement. Karnataka's magazine market offered children Tunturu, Balamangala and Chutuka, and offered adults film, family and literary weeklies, but the years between school and settled adulthood, the years of examinations, first jobs, migration to Bengaluru and negotiated independence from family, were served mainly by the general press. O Manase made those years its whole subject.
Ravi Belagere
The magazine cannot be understood apart from its editor. Ravi Belagere was born on 15 March 1958 in Ballari, Karnataka. He completed a master's degree in history, described in obituaries as an MA in history and archaeology from Karnataka University, and began his working life as a lecturer in history, teaching in Bellary, Hassan and Hubli before heading to Bengaluru in 1984. Biographical accounts also record a period of severe hardship in which he took a succession of low-paying jobs. That biography, the lecturer who had known menial work and failure, became part of his authority with young readers: he wrote about difficulty as someone who presented himself as having lived it.
Belagere became a household name in Karnataka through his direct, emotional and sometimes controversial style. He wrote more than seventy literary works across fiction, translation, storytelling, columns and biography, won the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award, the Rajyotsava Award and the Karnataka Media Academy Award for lifetime achievement, and reached television audiences with the crime programme Crime Diary, noted for his narration and among the first such programmes for Kannada viewers. He was an ardent fan of the writer Khushwant Singh and described himself as attracted to leftist ideology while holding no political leanings. O Manase was the youth-facing expression of that public personality.
After Hai Bangalore
O Manase grew out of an earlier success. On 25 September 1995, Belagere started the weekly Kannada tabloid Hai Bangalore together with R. T. Vittalamurthy, Ra. Somanath, Jogi and I. H. Sangam Dev, publishing it from his Padmanabhanagar office in Bengaluru. Its columns, including Love Lavike, Bottom Item and Khaas Baat, and above all Papigala Lokadalli, his series on the Bengaluru underworld, created many admirers, and accounts of his career describe the paper as the largest circulated in its market over five years. The tabloid's coverage of crime, scandal and city life also attracted criticism, and in 2003 its reporting accounted for thirteen of the forty-six complaints investigated by a Press Council of India inquiry into defamatory and damaging journalism in the southern states.
After that success, Belagere started O Manase. The sequence matters: the youth magazine was not an experiment by an unknown editor but the second venture of a man who had already demonstrated an exceptional ability to find and hold a Kannada readership that existing publications had missed. Where Hai Bangalore looked outward at the city's underworld and scandals, O Manase turned the same directness inward, to the reader's own life.
Fortnightly Publication and Bhavana Prakashana
O Manase was published fortnightly in print paperback form and on the web. Digital magazine listings record it under its publisher, Bhavana Prakashana, the publishing house associated with Belagere's ventures, which also published Hai Bangalore. Individual issues were sold digitally at twenty rupees: the listing for issue 108 records a publication date of 15 February 2015, and issue 102 is dated 16 November 2014, a sequence consistent with the fortnightly rhythm. The digital catalogue listed dozens of issues, and Kannada news sites reported when old issues of O Manase were made available online, allowing readers to return to a magazine many had first read in their youth.
A cover of the magazine's May 2018 edition survives in reference use, showing the title still in production in that period. The combination of print, web presence and a back-issue archive gave O Manase three lives at once: the current fortnightly on the stand, the editor's continuing public platform, and a growing library of youth writing that new readers could enter at any point.
Content: Troubles, Relationships and Popular Culture
The magazine's content followed its founding brief. It took up the difficulties and troubles of young people, which in the Karnataka of its years meant examination failure and educational pressure, unemployment and the search for work, migration from towns and villages to Bengaluru, money, romance and marriage against family expectation, and the general problem of becoming an adult in a society changing quickly around its young. Around that core it carried the material of popular culture that its readers inhabited. The tone was Belagere's: direct address, personal storytelling and advice delivered with the confidence of an elder who claimed to understand failure from inside.
The title also travelled beyond print in its editor's hands. O Manase became a signature phrase of Belagere's public speaking, and an audio work of the same name, presenting his inspirational address, circulated as a commercial audiobook edition narrated by him. The migration of the title from magazine to speech to audio recording shows how completely the magazine was identified with its editor's voice; readers were buying a relationship with that voice as much as a bundle of articles.
Editor's Death in 2020
Ravi Belagere died of a heart attack in Bengaluru on 13 November 2020, aged sixty-two. News agency reporting recorded that he was rushed to hospital but did not respond to treatment, that his mortal remains were kept at his Prarthana School premises for the public and dignitaries to pay their respects, and that the Chief Minister of Karnataka, B. S. Yediyurappa, condoled his death and recalled his work as a journalist and writer. The obituaries summarised the career in the terms by which Karnataka knew it: the tabloid Hai Bangalore, more than seventy literary works, the popular underworld column Papigala Lokadalli, and the launch of O Manase, a fortnightly magazine. A magazine so completely identified with one editor inevitably entered uncertainty at his death, and reference works continue to describe it in the form he gave it, with Belagere named as its chief executive and editor.
Sister Publication
O Manase's sister publication was Hai Bangalore, the weekly Kannada tabloid founded in 1995. The two titles were complementary halves of one editorial enterprise run through Bhavana Prakashana: the tabloid reported the city, especially its crime and scandals, while the magazine counselled the young reader living in that city. Readers could, and many evidently did, move between them, following the same editor from the underworld series to the youth fortnightly.
Place in Kannada Magazines
Lists of Kannada-language magazines include O Manase among the state's recognised periodicals, and its category, the youth fortnightly, was a distinctive one in a market organised mainly around children, families, film and literature. Its significance lies in the audience it named. By making young people's difficulties a magazine's entire subject, in Kannada, under one of the language's most popular editors, O Manase acknowledged a readership that Karnataka publishing had previously addressed only in passing. Its instant success, recorded in accounts of Belagere's career, demonstrated the size of that unmet demand.
Assessment
O Manase is a Kannada fortnightly youth magazine from Bengaluru, published by Bhavana Prakashana in print and on the web, whose title means O Mind and whose purpose was to speak to the difficulties and troubles of young people. It was founded by Ravi Belagere, the Ballari-born historian-turned-journalist whose Hai Bangalore had made him a household name, after that tabloid's success in 1995, and it was edited by him until his death in November 2020. Issues survive in digital catalogues from 2014 and 2015 and in a May 2018 edition, and old issues were placed online for the readers who had grown up with it. As a record of how Karnataka's young were addressed, in their own language and about their own inner lives, it holds a distinct place in Kannada magazine history.
