Nikhil Varma 1 The night was hushed, the tech city’s towers glowing like watchful giants against the deep blue sky, when Vihaan Mehta quietly wheeled his bicycle out of the garage. The faint hum of air-conditioners and the occasional flicker of a neon sign were the only sounds breaking the silence. Vihaan, his mind heavy with equations and career expectations drilled into him by his parents, pedaled out into the open streets with a sense of release that was almost intoxicating. Each push of the pedal loosened the chains of suffocating responsibility. His heart raced, not with fear of being…
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Niharika Gupta Chapter 1: Dreams Grounded Rohan Mehra sat cross-legged on the floor of his small Bangalore bedroom, his sketchbook balanced carefully on his knees. The hum of the ceiling fan above mingled with the faint noise of traffic from the streets outside, but he barely noticed; his world existed inside the fine pencil lines and rough outlines of wings and engines. Each page of his notebook bore traces of his obsession—wing spans carefully measured, landing gears penciled in with painstaking detail, and the occasional coffee stain from late-night work when he had refused to let sleep interrupt his imagination.…
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Rahul Malhotra One The summer sun was already high when Rohan, Anya, Kabir, and Tara found themselves assigned to the same group for their history project, a mundane school task about the “lost traditions of Himachal.” At first, they treated it with typical teenage indifference, expecting a few hours of research in the library and a quick, perfunctory presentation. Rohan, with his love for photography, suggested documenting old artifacts in the town; Kabir, always the skeptic, rolled his eyes at the thought of dusty legends; Tara, the organized one, insisted on interviews with the elders; and Anya, curious and restless,…
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Riya Bhattacharya 1 The sun hung low in the Kolkata sky, its light strangely muted as if nature itself was holding its breath. The city buzzed with excitement over the impending solar eclipse, the rare astronomical event that had drawn both superstition and science into equal frenzy. But sixteen-year-old Isha Sen couldn’t care less. Trapped in her family’s ancestral home in North Kolkata, a crumbling mansion older than the city’s electric lines, she fidgeted through incense smoke and the endless drone of priests chanting shlokas. Her mother had insisted they be there for “tradition,” and her grandmother, Dida, had only…