Karan Madhok

Short story: “Now, Lady, Miss: Please take the flowers and lean into your husband, like this, as if you are falling into him. Just a little. That’s why in English they say, ‘falling’ in love, no? Bas, gir jao unpar!”

Manish Gaekwad’s memoir Nautch Boy charts his passage between a Calcutta kotha and boarding school, but it is his mother who commands the stage.

“The mango is more of an emotion than anything else. There is so much difference in the fragrance. It’s not something chemical—it’s the soil [of India].” For The Print’s Ground Report, I wrote about the improbable journey of Indian mangoes to the diaspora in the USA

In Amitabha Bagchi’s Unknown City the narrator rethinks and judges himself for his past misapprehensions, until it culminates into retrospective novel that never stops scratching an itch, long after it begins to bleed.

An exhibition at DAG in Delhi, on the visual representation of Banaras from colonial times to the present day, captures the city’s vibrant essence.

With tens of crores of expected visitors, the Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj is among the largest human gatherings in the world. The mythologies associated with the Samudra Manthana and Shiva’s affinity for bhang often associate it with spiritual cannabis use, too.

An excerpt from ‘Ananda: An Exploration of Cannabis in India’, by Karan Madhok.

For centuries, it was medicine and spiritual aid—even as it produced charas, ganja, and bhang. Today, a microscopic measurement of 0.3% stands between profit and prison. As states experiment with legalising cannabis, farmers, scientists, and entrepreneurs navigate a regulatory maze. The line between nasha and dawai grows hazier.

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…’