Exercise 2 — Voice Deep Dive Goal: Create a narrative voice inseparable from the POV character — diction, rhythm, metaphor, syntax. Prompt: Return to the childhood home after years away: meticulous, control-obsessed POV. Target Length: 1,000 words I turned the corner and expected to see the banyan tree, but only a fat stump…
Exercise 1 — POV Purity & Sensory Anchoring Goal: Absolute discipline — no POV violations, no floating camera. Build trust through strict sensory filtering. Prompt: Packing a suitcase after a breakup — the other person is in the next room, silent. Target Length: 1,000 words I can hear her bare feet shuffling across…
Prateek joined in the revolution of words, “This is not a poem, but a prayer, a prayer that comes deep from my heart for all the men in this world.” “May men know how to bow to the softness within them and around them. May men understand that protection doesn’t…
A first look at the cover for my upcoming hard science fiction novel—set in a near-future India where physics, geopolitics, and deep space engineering collide. Zero Dimensional Space – Book 1 begins not with warp drives or alien signals, but with a physics anomaly in a Casimir force experiment at a…
Desires are from the world. The blurry whirlpool, the muddled cesspool. True yearning is something unfinished, something untouched. It only belongs to you, And only you… Desires are like sweets in a candy store, decayed tooth and refined sugar, dopamine and fake high.. Restlessness masquerading as happiness. True yearning wants to use you…
I don’t think Rajeev’s secretary understands what’s sitting on my desk. For weeks I’ve been sending papers, abstracts, and “short write-ups” to help her “brief him when he has the time.” Each time I send one, another request comes back. He’s a busy man, I know—but this isn’t a Mars…
What is sisterhood after all? It isn’t divine masculine, nor is it divine feminine, but it surely seems like divine comedy, a BIG FAT uproarious comedy. Girls are human, women are human. We are as flawed as men, animals, inanimate objects, plants, flowers, stones, rocks…we all get stuck in survival,…
Is a woman’s rage very different from a man’s rage? Perhaps it is; a woman waits and waits, until she can’t wait anymore. Once she stops waiting, it can scare the hell out of all the wrongdoers, like Mother Earth appearing in the form of ‘Devi’ herself, and handing out…
Imagination Comes First It still amazes me how much joy I felt simply imagining it—ISRO, India’s space agency, not just building rockets or launching satellites, but becoming a true spacefaring force. I’d sit for hours on my couch, eyes half-closed, imagining Gaganyaan lifting off with the sun rising behind it, imagining…
There are some characters I hesitate to describe — not because there isn’t much to say, but because too much would be lost in the telling. Lata is one of them. She humbles me. She unsettles me. And sometimes, without warning, she angers me. That’s all I can say, for…