Personal Essay by Kinjal Sethia: ‘Some lanterns burned outside this huddle of bhajans and stories. As kids, we kept close to the elders. It would be hauntingly dark outside this circle, and we pretended to conjure witches waiting in the inner rooms or imagined that the screech of the fruit bats was the call of the spirits.’

In Brute Face/Home Truth (2025), Rounak Maiti presents a personal, cathartic album, with a dizzying soundscape that remains unbound by the constructs of genre. By Saptaparna Samajdar

From Coldplay’s misguided “Hymn for the Weekend” to Ed Sheeran’s collaborative “Sapphire,” Akankshya Abismruta celebrates a new kind of cultural synthesis between the West and the East.

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.’

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.

Even with its feminist gaze, Dabba Cartel’s biggest win is how it resists baking its narrative with one-note markers of gender and social identity. The result is a batch of hungry women out to hunt—sinking their teeth in this world to devour it to their heart’s content. By Sneha Bengani

Age and youth, love found and love lost, a city of excess and a city of scarcity—Sarthak Parashar examines the many contrasts balanced by Payal Kapadia in the acclaimed All We Imagine As Light (2024).

Essay by Tansy Troy: ‘As arresting now as when first sculpted, Navjot’s contemplation of the feminine form is no less contemporary, no less urgent to consider than when she created the red-and-blue lady thirty years ago.’

With a major national robotics win, two Mumbai teenagers take their creation to the World Robotics Olympiad. Their accomplishment could pave the way for more future leaders from India in the fields of science and technology. By Bushra Satkhed

Nivedita Dey recalls the glory days of Mumbai’s bygone Cafe Samovar, where for decades, friends, family, strangers, students, lawyers, homemakers, thinkers, creative souls, Bollywood icons, Marxists, liberals, and more diverse groups of humans huddled over cups of cutting chai.

The dystopian universe of Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) is a prophetic chronicling of crisis as a condition of existence, and the contingency of truth as a mode of knowing or bearing witness to crisis. By Paromita Patranobish

Fiction by Adrija Chatterjee: ‘For twenty-eight consecutive days, there had been no phone call from Oli’s house, from Ravti. You understand how the grave the situation is, an already unelectrified village, perhaps now shrouded in some unimaginable stillness.’