Priyanka Chakrabarty dives into examples of contemporary South Asian literature to explore the blurred line between trauma and ‘trauma porn’. Can fiction account for lived experiences and realities of trauma without making the plot performative?

SonyLIV web series Rocket Boys is a rare exception among recent dramas, where an entertaining story of post-Independent India also holds up a mirror of truths. - By Atulya Pathak

A collection of 45 essays and stories written by several Indian writers, The Book of Dog brings the canine-human connection front-and-centre: the dogs we love, adopt, lose, and remember forever. By Chittajit Mitra

A poem by Sayani Mukherjee: ‘where Jargons kept our brew alive and we sat cross legged with armours high up from howling screams’

Personal essay by Dhani Muniz: ‘What is Australia then? The name itself conveys a ruddy blankness. Deserts rising out of ocean like heat from a radiator. Twenty months since I’ve left India and the old-Old World of the East.’

The Advaita Bodhi Foundation—working in digital literacy and rural enterprise—has set about pushing entrepreneurship among the Lodha community in West Bengal. By Medha Dutta Yadav

For centuries, Varanasi has welcomed all visitors into the same all-encompassing embrace. With aggressive forces of politics and religion threatening to segregate his hometown, Karan Madhok argues for the need to preserve the city’s true harmonious spirit.

Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s debut collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse (Hawakal Publishers) dissolves the space between innate and extraneous, past and present, dreams and disillusionments, commonplace and cosmic, seamlessly flitting through rooms, cities, memory, borders and history. By Ritoshree Chatterjee

A poem by John Copley Alter: ‘what was indigenous / in our childhood’s garden? became / native, mother tongue—our flora— / blossoming…’

In Zilka Joseph’s new collection In Our Beautiful Bones, Chintan Girish Modi celebrates the in-betweenness of cultures, the confluence of food, culture, politics, religion, and beauty from the vantage point of an Indian displaced abroad.

Poetry by Harsh Anand: ‘everyone pointed out, / the crevices in my bones, / as if I am unaware of my own biology, / as if my suffering is more endurance than expression.’

What’s The Chakkar? Episode 16: We’re reading Krupa Ge and Gary Shteyngart; watching 83; and listening to Aditi Ramesh. Featuring Shaista Vaishnav, Prateek Santram, and Ady Manral. Hosted by Karan Madhok.