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Started in last July, Chill Maadi has recorded more than 1.5 lakh hits

Education hub Manipal always yearned for a platform for creative minds — not just for posting bulletins, but to share information and creativity. And the students of Manipal University found that digital media was the easiest platform to connect with each other and hence, they launched Manipal’s first online magazine, Chill Maadi.

Gopal Krishna, a second year mechanical engineering student and founder of Chill Maadi, said, “It was one of those lucky evenings when I dreamt of materialising a national youth magazine operating from Manipal. The immediate thought that followed was resources. Being a student with no capital, I had to start from scratch.”
 
Though his semester exams were going on, the idea had his entire attention. He kept searching for people who could design the web portal, write articles, click pictures, content editors and marketing managers.
 
That was when he met Frenil Sanghavi and Aviral Kedia and Navraj Shubham who agreed to take charge of the editorial section. Gopal still needed more people like brand managers, PROs, marketing executives and artists. “I was lucky to find Avneer Bhadauria, Himanshu Bajpai, Ishali Tiwari, Gaurav Kumar, Rahul Azad and Gaurav Prakash. They were given charge of other sections. We worked together during vacations. As we progressed, people from different colleges in Manipal joined us. We worked overnight and eventually managed to release the magazine on July 11, 2011.”
 
The response for the first issue was overwhelming. “We got more than 3,500 readers for our first issue. Since then, there has been no looking back,” Gopal said, adding that the website has got more than 1.5 lakh hits so far.
 
Gradually, the team christened itself as Team Yuva and at present has 112 members.
 
Bhavana Akella, Chill Maadi’s editor and a student of journalism, said, “We focused entirely on connecting the youth and serving as a responsible and reliable medium of communication. We cover topics related like issues faced by students and ways to tackle them, our take on the current scenario in the country, articles related to career opportunities, technology, books, travel, health, reviews on movies and interviews with celebrities and other professions.”
 
The magazine has been the official media partners of Techtatva-2011, the Technical fest of Manipal Institute of Technology, Atharva, the B-School fest of T A Pai Management Institute. “We are aiming to be a creative youth network on national level,” said Bhavana.