Kunal Sinha 1 It was a humid, sticky evening in Kolkata when Maya Sengupta first noticed something was amiss. The streets outside her apartment were bathed in the warm golden light of the streetlamps, but the stillness of the night felt heavy, almost suffocating. The only sounds that punctuated the silence were the occasional honk of distant cars and the rustling of the trees swaying under the breeze. Maya had just finished her work for the day and was sipping on a hot cup of tea when her phone rang. The sudden noise startled her. It was late — too…
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Radhika Iyer One The monsoon had just started whispering over Chennai when Rudra Iyer walked into the Madras Chess Club for his final pre-tournament practice. The marble floor of the hall was damp from the humid wind sneaking in through the old lattice windows, and the scent of wet books, sweat, and varnished wood gave the room an odd comfort he had always known. At twenty-four, Rudra was already a Grandmaster and the brightest Indian hope in the upcoming Tamil Nadu International Grandmasters Open. But today, something felt misaligned. On the board, he played a quiet e4, the most classic…
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Aditi Roy Sharma 1 Samar Ghosh stared blankly at the glowing screen of his laptop, its harsh blue light reflecting off his glasses as the world outside his hostel window drifted into silence. The ceiling fan above creaked lazily, slicing through the thick summer night air of the campus. Around him, the room was cluttered with open textbooks, crumpled notes, and half-finished instant noodles—a portrait of academic exhaustion. But it wasn’t the unfinished code on his terminal or the pending assignments that held his attention tonight. It was the crushing weight of falling behind. Once hailed as a prodigy from…