Karan Madhok

Despite its religious and medicinal significance, cannabis continues to be vilified in India. High time we reclaimed the herb for what it truly is.

In Fire on the Ganges, Radhika Iyengar unveils the lives and struggles of Varanasi’s Dom community.

Poetry: ‘couldn’t i unsign the social contract, / a sunbathing vampire, a genie unshackled, / a pair of eyes that awake to starry nights painted / on the bedroom ceiling?’

Personal Essay: ‘A man dressed in black robes stood by the bed, his stern face staring down at her. Death was a millimetre away, as effortless as peeling away an onion.’

My poem ‘house plants’ has been included in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal), edited by Sukrita Paul Kumar and Vinita Agarwal.

‘…Nikhil taught me that nothing serves human memory better than a timely reminder. The avalanche of memories becomes personality, and an avalanche of personalities becomes a person…’

An in-depth interview with Saurabh Sharma for Scroll: ‘Human artists should create art that has only sparsely existed before’.

I shared my top-10 favourite books ever for the January 2023 issue of Reader’s Digest, featuring The Stranger, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Midnight’s Children, and more!

‘…Over the years, however, this idea of divinity had slowly reduced to indifference. In long stretches when he drove without a passenger around the city, hypnotised by the rhythmic sputters of the vehicle, by his lonesome, he allowed himself to regret his decisions…'

Fiction: A young Indian man confronts hard realities in his final moments as a murder victim in USA

My story “Public Record” is featured in the anthology, A Case of Indian Marvels - Dazzling Stories from the Country’s Finest New Writers (Aleph Book Company 2022). Edited by David Davidar, this is “the first major anthology of short stories by India’s most exciting new writers… The forty stories in the volume explore every aspect of the Indian ethos in original and electrifying ways.”

‘…Kunal imagines Yashaswi Sir running in the dark, back towards the bus, through the grass and the weeds and the shrubs. Over snakes and rabbits and frogs. Away from the light, seeing nothing, vacuum only making way for more vacuum…’

‘…My mother handed me the postcard… I couldn’t believe my eyes…Tendulkar had written to me, addressed me by my first name, acknowledged my whole existence with a single thick piece of rectangular paper...’

‘…This seat looks different under a familiar light, as if it was a discarded organ, useless unless I prescribe a use upon it. It’s a seat, I murmur to myself…’

How a generation of Punjabi giants rode the highs and lows of Indian basketball, guided by one slight Tamilian man.

‘…the plants once shared an iridescent home / but nothing on the balcony survives / exposed under the naked rays…’

‘…there are a million other things / you could do besides breathing / the outside air, / asbestos and apathy / make a heady cocktail…’

“… Are we mere companions, or do we swim / Together in the fountains of heaven, waters blue?…”

“… I was once a boy yearning to run back home. I’m now a man stubbornly running further away. And even the most ingenious plot couldn’t conspire of a way back…”

‘you survived: / a stranger among ancestors, / born on the wrong side of a new / imaginary line’