Best wishes for a Happy New Year! May God’s best Blessings make your New Year happy!

TMR  December 2008 brings to the readers a varied collection of poems, haiku,  short stories, artwork, book reviews and many other illuminating things such as literary facts, gems of quotations etc. This journal is publishing  creative writings and artwork for several years.  Without the cooperation and kind support provided by the creative artists included in this issue Taj is inconceivable. I have been receiving an increasingly vast number of  poems, shorter fiction and artwork, but it is not possible to publish each artist due to lack of space. Therefore only those compositions have been selected for this issue, which reveal author’s passionate thinking about life, transcendentalism, mood of the new century, idealism in accordance with reason and commonsense, and concentrating on inner experience.  

With great pleasure I write that both I and Karunesh Kumar Agrawal attended Oslo Literature Festival, Norway : WORDS-ONE PATH TO PEACE AND UNDERSTANDING, 18-20 September 2008. It is a great service, fertile in consequence, to the cause of world literature that Eli Borchgrevink and Adam Donaldson Powell have done to bring together the creative artists from the four continents. Brynjar, Nasra, Thorborg did a lot to make the festival a grand success. A great truth was laid upon us in the Oslo Literary Festival as the authors from Norway, South Africa, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Uruguay, Sweden and India dined together and revitalized the entire scene by  discussions and interviews about Multilingual literature, current and future trends in electronic publishing, Adam Donaldson Powell  reading five poems in five languages. The papers presented were full of psychological insight and philosophic vision. It is really an unforgettable experience for me to feel ‘exquisite variety and varied exquisiteness’, and remember the glistening images of Oslo festival.  

Hearty congratulations  to Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, 47, on his being elected 44^th  President of the United States . He defeated Senator John McCain. I also offer my congratulations to the French writer J.M.G. Le Clézio, for winning 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was cited as "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”  

I’m trying my best to publish talented poets, haiku, short story writers and artists worldwide for Peace and Brotherhood. Biography of each artist is provided in a separate section of the issue. I’m deeply obliged to the authors and artists included in this issue for generous support and kind cooperation in bringing out this edition of TMR.

              Best Wishes for a HAPPY NEW YEAR.

SANTOSH KUMAR
Chief Editor