D M. Madhava Prasad interviews, articles on science, politics, fashion, cinema, religion and other topics as well as readers' columns, snippets of information, cartoons, jokes etc. This kind of magazine has rarely been studied as a cultural format, a recurring grid within which units of writing and illustration of varying length are presented. Short stories and serialised novels, for instance, are closely associated with the emergence of the magazine format. We do know something 121 about how novelists contrived to maintain audience interest at the end of each instalment of a serialised novel and how this makes a difference to the way a novel progresses, even to its formal properties. We also know something about the short story as a form. But we know very little about the magazine asform(at) within whose spaces these forms were presented. There are innumerable magazines of this kind (it has to be seen whether television will or has already pushed them into decline) in most of the Indian languages. One thing that these magazines share with television is the foreground/background relation between two types of content: the advertisements and the reading material. The latter is presented in both in a wide variety of forms and sizes, using various techniques to grade them in some order of importance. The cover page of a magazine provides clues to the importance given to the contents of the particular issue while television has developed a stable division of programme time into slots of varying importance: daytime, morning and early evening for children's programming, prime time and late night. There is more flexibility in this regard in the magazine than on television since prime time is likely to be the same for any general purpose channel but even in magazines, the pages often have their own valence: thus the Kannada magazine Sudha reserves the last pages for sports and film news and some of the early pages for the cover story, and so on. These parallels notwithstanding, it is obvious that television and the magazine are not quite the same thing. There are two crucial points of difference. First, there is the difference between reading and viewing which has a past history in the interface between writing and cinema and secondly, there is the change from a spatial to a temporal order of presentation of material. In spite of the substantial freedom from temporal limitations provided by the VCR (which makes it possible to record a programme and view it at leisure), the sheer volume of programming places limits on its utility. Besides, the viewing of recorded programmes cannot substitute for ^TV watching", with its aura of liveness. (Nothing brings out this distinction more starkly than the staleness and remoteness of the commercial, when it is seen as part of a recorded programme. Instead of the live address that it usually incorporates, the commercial turns into an image of itself, deprived of its ability to communicate directly, i.e., to communicate at all.) During the heyday of the features magazine, avid readers of serial novels cut out the relevant pages before discarding the magazine and, when the novel was complete, got the pages bound together to make a domestically produced "book". In the case of television, however, producing and maintaining such a library would be far more expensive and time-consuming, which is why the VCR, where it is available, serves only a limited supplementary role. Television-viewing is also more likely to be a collective family event, unlike reading, which is individualised by necessity. Numbers 32-33