Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

  On a cool January evening in Pune, the city exhaled a gentle hush. The air carried the scent of roasted peanuts and eucalyptus, and the sky above Model Colony was a soft indigo, stitched with the first stars. An old bungalow, once belonging to a freedom fighter, now hosted a literary soiree — poets, professors, musicians, and wanderers gathered under fairy lights and faded portraits to celebrate the written word.   Arjun Deshmukh, 38, stood near a bookshelf lined with dusty Marathi anthologies and translated Russian novels. His lean frame was wrapped in a navy Nehru jacket, and his eyes — brown, thoughtful, slightly sunken — moved across the room like a man searching for a sentence he’d once read but couldn’t recall. A literature professor at Ferguson College, Arjun was known for his lectures on Eliot and Ambedkar, but tonight he felt like a footnote in someone else’s poem.  His wife, Abha, 35, moved through the crowd with quiet grace. Her silver saree shimmered like ...

   Abhi Mujh Mein Kahin from the new Agnipath is a song most of us like. The feelings it generates of tenderness, longing and rediscovery are too delicate. Amitabh Bhattacharya and Ajay-Atul along with Sonu Nigam have created magic. I have attempted to write on similar lines. Somewhere within me, still, you breathe, A whisper soft the winds don’t sheath. Though time has tried to dim your light, You bloom in shadows of the night. A touch, a glance, a fleeting sigh, You taught my silent soul to cry. I’d buried dreams beneath the frost, But in your warmth, no hope was lost. I feared the joy—it felt too rare, Like morning dew too shy to dare. Yet in your smile, the world stood still, And love returned against my will. You didn’t ask, you didn’t plead, You simply gave what hearts most need. A moment’s peace, a breath so true, A chance to feel the sky turn blue. Now even pain feels strangely sweet, Where sorrow and my heartbeat meet. For once I lived, if j...

This story is dedicated to those anonymous Content Moderators who strive to keep the internet safe.   Shweta Subramaniam’s job was invisible, and so was she. In the thirteenth floor of a glass- panelled tower in Lower Parel, Mumbai, she sat behind a fingerprint-locked door labelled “Content Integrity Division.” The office was sterile—white LED lights, grey cubicles, and the faint hum of servers that sounded like a distant swarm of bees. Her workspace was a 4x4 cubicle with a dual-monitor setup, a coffee-stained mug that ironically read “Ctrl+Z Life,” and a chair whose wheels squeaked like they were protesting every movement. She wore what most moderators wore: anonymity. Faded jeans, a loose T-shirt in muted teal, and a pair of worn-out sneakers that had seen more night shifts than daylight. Her hair was always tied back in a messy bun, strands escaping like thoughts she couldn’t contain. She didn’t wear makeup anymore. What was the point? Her face was lit only by the glow...