Poetry by Goirick Brahmachari: ‘Love is like the wild lilacs, white / Apple trees over green meadows, / Riverstones I have walked over / For years— splattered, irate, broken.’

Meena Kandasamy’s collection Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You is poetry as resistance literature, where aesthetic beauty and political activism merge to challenge a nation’s conscience. By Amritesh Mukherjee

Neha Dixit, the author of The Many Lives of Syeda X, speaks about the story of an ‘invisible’ India through the tale of one working-class woman, her approaches to journalism, and the “collective failure” of Indian society. By Saurabh Sharma

Poetry by Vinita Agrawal: ‘The valley hums every summer— / the murmur of a year’s worth of wounds. // It seems nature remembers / what we’ve have tried to bury.’

Personal Essay by Namrata: ‘Language is meant to bring us closer. To help us say: I see you. I want to understand you. I care enough to learn your words. And when we turn language into a line in the sand and use it to exclude, to shame, to assert dominance, we forget its most sacred purpose: to connect.’

Told through the perspective of twisted innocence, Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s The One Legged looms large with uncertainties, unopened doors, haunted pasts, and an atmosphere of pure terror. By Sneha Pathak

Poetry by Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan: ‘Pressing my ear to the ground / straining to hear / the universe speak. / The faintest tremor / of the butterfly wing’

Poetry by Anushka Chavan: ‘Will you drag me onto the shore, or should I become the tide? / Will you bring me home, to the river, / Or will I be lost in the hills once more?’

Delhi-based musician Tarun Balani’s new album weaves jazz improvisation with Sindhi folk echoes, creating a cohesive journey through memory, identity, and longing. By Treya Sinha

As a generation of Indians move from living in houses to apartments, Vipin Labroo argues that we must envision our new spaces to reflect better synthesis with the rhythms of nature, the way that our traditional homes once were.

With the recent restoration and re-release of Umrao Jaan (1981), Himanshi Aggarwal revisits the film from a queer lens, as Rekha’s titular character serves as an allegory for anyone forced to perform respectability in a world that denies them legitimacy.

In his multigenerational saga A Person is a Prayer (2024) Ammar Kalia weaves together several characters, each struggling, yearning, and often failing to find clarity in the shadows of their predecessors. As with many internal struggles, they persist in silence. By Shivani Patel