EDITORS NOTE

Once upon a time, I joined RS when I was just finishing school. I answered an ad for a writer’s post and brought a cartoon instead. Cause please, cartoons are funnier than a 1000 funny words. Many years later, I came back to Daily Star to work in the editorial section. Two months later, bored out of my mind, they offered me the entire craziness known as RS for a period of two years. Dream job cause I could do anything, every day. Well, almost anything. Some things had to be slipped in discreetly. That was RS through and through, strangeness turning into print. I'll miss it cause RS let me run amok with the weirdest thoughts in my head. And there were so many people like me out there. Damn. Oh well...

– Ehsanur Raza Ronny, Editor, The Rising Stars.

RS is ending. No matter how many times I think it, say it out loud, read it on print and update our fanpage status about it, I still can't quite reconcile with it. There was a part of me, maybe locked up in the attic of a long abandoned house, which kept hoping against hope. Perhaps they'd reconsider, perhaps one day I'd show up at work and everyone would confess that they were playing a really cruel prank on me all along. But here I am, writing the final note for the final issue. Joke's on me, I suppose. In the last one and a half years, I have made mistakes, written good articles, bad articles and everything in between. Laughed till I cried from laughing or simply facepalmed at the lameness. But there was always an inherent honesty to whatever we did. Yes, RS is ending and I may never have a job as cool as this, but I take my leave content with the knowledge of all the good times we've shared. You and me, on opposite sides of an 8 page weekly. And I thank everyone I've encountered along the way. The paper could not have possibly been what it is without you.

-- Ahmad Ibrahim, Sub-editor, The Rising Stars.

Rising Stars is my best friend. I grew up with Sabrina F Ahmad's book reviews, Tareq Adnan's baroque works of fiction, Kazim Ibn Sadique's passionate pieces on cricket and The Mood Dude and Gokhra's debates on cars. I applied on a whim after seeing the recruitment notice, and after a nervous interview where I cracked lame jokes and saw my idols wrinkling their noses in disappointment, somehow, I made it to the team. RS held me as I grew into a teenager, learned and laughed as part of the freelance team, and it saw me into adulthood when I got the job and a contract as a sub-editor of the very paper that inspired me to write and fueled my hunger for knowledge.
RS is all grown up now. As sad as it is, it was also inevitable. We cannot hold on to our childhood forever, and growing up is a terrible alternative, but an unavoidable one. The tears will dry up soon, hopefully. But this paper will never be far from our hearts. Here's to over a thousand awesome Thursday mornings.

--Shaer Reaz, sub-editor, The Rising Stars