Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

The metro screeched into Viman Nagar station, its compartments spilling commuters like faceless ant’s from an ant hill. Among them was Raghav Pandit, a bachelor who had just crossed fifty, whose presence was as unremarkable as the rust on the railings. He wore a faded blue shirt, carried a leather satchel that had seen better decades, and walked with the kind of practiced indifference that only years of solitude could perfect. Raghav worked as a head clerk in a government office at Viman Nagar. His job was to file papers, stamp approvals, and nod at superiors. He had no friends at work, only colleagues who greeted him with the obligatory “Good morning, sir,” and ignored him by lunch. His evenings were spent in a one-bedroom flat in Kothrud, where the ceiling fan sometimes worked and creaked softly like his voice. He ate alone. Walked alone. Slept alone. And yet, city seemed to roar around him—its horns, its hawkers, its high-rises. The city was a living organism, pulsing with ambit...

  The auditorium was hushed, the kind of silence that feels like a held breath. Twenty-six year old Vedant Joshi, stood under the soft amber spotlight, his Indigo kurta creased at the elbows from nervous palms. Outside, Pune’s October drizzle tapped gently on the windows, like a rhythm trying to remember itself. He looked out at the crowd — students, elders, couples, a few youth with rainbow pins — and began: I was not born to cleanse your shame, Nor play the silence in your name. I was not carved to fit your mou ld, Or shrink my truth to make you bold. I rise not from your fear or doubt, But from the voice you cast out. I speak because I still remain A son, a soul, not just your pain. The words hung in the air, fragile and defiant. A few heads nodded. A woman in a cotton saree clutched her son’s hand. Somewhere a mother silently wiped a tear. A father shifted in his seat, eyes moist but proud. The gathering was quiet, but not passive — it was a room of people who had ...

  The monsoon in Pune had turned every street into a silver river, but inside her Erandwane apartment, sixty-three year old Asha Pathak felt nothing, but arid drought. Her chest tightened each morning as if an invisible hand squeezed her heart. The coffee pot on the stove—once the herald of dawn—now sat cold. Memories of laughter and righteous debates over Sanskrit shlokas had eroded into echoes. Six years after her husband’s death, Asha’s intelligence, once her brightest flame, flickered under the weight of exhaustion and loneliness.  Asha paced the narrow living room, tracing grains of the Shahabadi floor tiles. Each step whispered reminders of her son’s farewell hug at the airport, of the day she defended her doctoral thesis at Cambridge, of the time she convinced a class of sceptical students that the metaphors in the Bhagavad Gita weren’t archaic riddles but living truths. Now, every archived memory felt like a relic behind glass— seen but untouchable, unreachable. ...