Photo Gallery: Mumbai offers a heady balance of preserving the past while moving forward at breakneck speed, of the iconic, the beautifully mundane, and everything else in between. Here are snapshots from the Maximum City over the past decade - by Karan Madhok

Art: To support a charity project, Angad B. Sodhi embarked on an ambitious project, creating a hundred unique little pieces of art on clay diyas for Diwali.

Poetry and art by Jharna Sanyal and Partha Pratim Roy: ‘Sometimes I walk out of my skin / in search of the duck pond where / moss green water plays with thirsty branches’.

A poem by Karan Madhok: “i have time to ask why i have time, / to contemplate this sudden nothingness.”

Photo Essay: Amidst the gorgeous Himalayan backdrop in the hamlet of Landour (Mussoorie) Gopala Krishna finds strange beauty in the old Bazaar, where history has long stood still for the local community.

Photo Essay: Lost without direction, and happy to keep moving—Varanasi’s labyrinthine old gullies and the Ganga riverside provide the glimpse of a world without time, where the ancient world collapses into the present. By Karan Madhok

Poetry by Sanskriti K: ‘And watching me- / hacking the fruits of / the subconscious / from the tedious branches / of unexposed reality.’

Poetry by Lesley Simeon: ‘Where will you be then? / In books and magazines, where history is mass produced? / In your mind, trapped by your conscience, guilty of slumber?’

Poetry by Khushi Agarwal: ‘you can’t remember the way your belly hugged / each syllable of your laughter .’

Poetry by Ritamvira Bhattacharya: ‘half burnt cigarettes do the talking /when the sound of the room sleeps.’

Senryu and Haiku by Nishi Pulugurtha: ‘there is no joy here / only shrieks and tears of pain’.

Indian Matchmaking: So, why were you rejected? A comic story by Maitri Dore