Parabaas, Inc. was formed in 1997 to promote Bengali language, literature, and culture on the internet. Since then, we have been regularly bringing to our readers Bengali contemporary writing in this emerging medium through our webzine Parabaas. In fact, Parabaas has been the first Bengali webzine. In February 2001, we started a new section to carry English translations of work by major Bengali authors.
This has been followed, over the years, by several other special bilingual sections on Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Buddhadeva Bose, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Jibanananda Das.
A part of our mission has been to develop and standardize cyber-friendly word-processing tools in Bengali and make them freely available to our readers. This effort has naturally expanded itself to include other Indic languages in our scope. Parabaas-Axar, a Bengali word processing software, had been developed and distributed free at a time when such tools were not otherwise available.