Excerpts from Aruni Kashyap’s critically-acclaimed poetry collection, There Is No Good Time For Bad News (2021): ‘Women couldn’t melt you, shape you, stud you with gems / to hang from their soft earlobes; men / couldn’t wrap you in strips of newsprint, / like tobacco, light one end, take a drag,’

Poetry by Anna Lynn: ‘The young one eats only the fried fish. Her own stomach does not prefer fins swimming against the currents of life.’

From the Himalaya to the coastlines, unchecked tourism is destroying India’s ecological balance. We can’t afford to return to our pre-pandemic state of a tourist-induced environmental catastrophe. By Vipin Labroo

Art, catharsis, and colourful calamities—Tamizh Ponni shares a collection of original digital paintings created over the lockdown.

Flash Fiction by Zalma A.: ‘She knew there was another possibility. Surrender. Or submit. Yes, submit. It’s a more positive word. Optimism. In tragedy.’

A poem by Akash Sinha: ‘I've been sleeping on the soggy cardboard on the used side of your lips’

Under the isolation and layers of stress brought upon by the pandemic, many are turning to the old comfort of personal letters—handwritten and otherwise—to find hope, solace, and connection. By Akhila Damodadran

Poetry and art by Tamizh Ponni ‘the world will never get to know / one frightful naked truth / that the mirror and its muse / were beyond repair, forever scarred.’

Photo Gallery: Traversing across a labyrinth of water from Alappuzha to Kochi, the canals, lakes, and lagoons that form the serene backwaters of Kerala. By Karan Madhok

Short story by Ramzauva Chhakchhuak: ‘People in the neighborhood didn’t even care if Bala was looking straight at them. It was as if he didn’t exist.’

A poem by Karan Madhok: ‘there are a million other things / you could do besides breathing / the outside air, / asbestos and apathy / make a heady cocktail’

Six poems by John Copley Alter: ‘Three ages ago you were / wrestling with mortality, my brother. / Today you are open in my mind like / a score of music, a keyboard, waiting.’