Favourite Horror Story
Flash fiction by Karan Madhok: ‘Kunal imagines Yashaswi Sir running in the dark, back towards the bus, through the grass and the weeds and the shrubs. Over snakes and rabbits and frogs. Away from the light, seeing nothing, vacuum only making way for more vacuum.’
A Searing Little Fire in Mumbai
Photo Gallery: Infrastructural concerns and safety negligence have led to multiple major fires in Mumbai in recent years. But there are fires that often go unreported, small flares that alert the Maximum City of the rising infernos to come. By Altamash Kadir
Erisa Neogy and the Workshop of Music
Personal Essay: Erisa Neogy is a backwoods Renaissance luthier, beatnik and general enigma. For the working musician, his workshop in Auroville is something out of a fairy-tale. By Dhani Muniz
Jazz Blues
A poem by Sayani Mukherjee: ‘‘A beau of my ice cream pot / Blackcurrants and choco deep breath / Melting as the sea rushes by / Holding by the June night’
‘The river falls into a folded slumber’ – Two poems by Debarati Sen
Poetry by Debarati Sen: ‘I sketch bougainvillea with the moon. / The clouds smell of dreams today / assorted as per my mood.’
Where are the photographs Ma? A ghazal by Pragya Mittal
Poetry by Pragya Mittal: ‘Whatever the heart carries is buried in the jargon of technology. / A button of delete, with a noise of take-off, finishes a gallery.’
Gardens of the Past: Two poems by Bharti Bansal
Two poems by Bharti Bansal: ‘I believe grandmothers can see through us / As haunting as it sounds, I find relief in the knowledge / That someone will always know this little part of me’
The City Is A Festering Wound: Three poems by Samiksha Ransom
Poetry by Samiksha Ransom: ‘the city is a lacerated arm / hanging loose from a plaster / a red flag made of dupatta’
A colourful passage through time: Photos from Fort Kochi
No place in the world is quite like Fort Kochi—A collage of Indian, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Chinese cultural and architectural influences, a humming postcard from the past. Photo Gallery by Karan Madhok
Commodity Fetishism—and the crafts to counter it
Personal Essay: Shambhavi Gupta explores why consistent engagement with craft—like crochet—holds the potential to liberate us from the cloud of fetishism, which obscures our vision of the products and services we purchase.
The ‘Unconventional’ Choice is not a choice
Personal essay by Sourima Chakraborty: ‘I opted out of my profession soon after, much to the chagrin of my well-wishers. The day I told my mother how I wish to live—or rather, how I need to live—she suspected that I might be reading the wrong kind of philosophy books.’