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The Punch Magazine An international digital magazine of luxury, arts, design, lifestyle, travel, hospitality, food, literature and culture. [email protected]

The Punch Magazine is an independent monthly digital magazine of arts, literature and culture, being run from New Delhi, India. An initiative by Punch Art & Culture Foundation, a non-profit set up to promote the best of literary, artistic and cultural traditions around the world, it was founded by Shireen Quadri in 2016. Since then, the magazine has emerged as a vibrant space for diverse forms of expression. The Punch Magazine features in-depth and insightful essays, interviews, reportage, narrative non-fiction, photo essays, poetry and fiction. Conceived as a literary and an arts collective with a focus to promote intellectual engagement and inquiry with regard to arts and literature, The Punch Magazine features well-researched pieces on arts, literature, entertainment, fashion, lifestyle, hospitality, travel and tourism and businesses and start-ups. Striving to achieve exacting standards of excellence, the underlying quest of the magazine is to explore the points of convergence between the best of artistic, entrepreneurial and creative efforts. Brought out in a digital format, The Punch Magazine also brings out thematic issues every now and then in order to delve deep into a particular arena of arts and literature. Alongside original long-form and quick-read content (exclusive excerpts, interviews and essays), it publishes the best writings, videos and voices — emerging, established and experimental — from across the globe through a wide network of literary and cultural partners, both individuals and institutions. As a magazine dedicated to substantive and critical pieces on the different facets of arts and literature, we are forever in need of resources to keep the ambitious scale and scope of our work unhindered and unhamstrung. Your support, therefore, is crucial to help us stay on course, trudging along the path that we have created for ourselves with blood and sweat, a path that often leaves us sailing against the wind. If you come to like our substantive work as well as our core ethos, you can consider sending in your donations here: https://pmny.in/bIOoHPmr5CSw. On PayPal, use this link to donate:. https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/thepunchmagazine

Or send donations via PayPal to [email protected] Alternatively, you can transfer your donation online to Punch Art & Culture Foundation, Account No: 919010036898613, Axis Bank, IFSC Code: UTIB0000715

15/09/2026

Paradise Promised, presented by The Knowledge Convergence Foundation at Kalamkaar, Bikaner House, brings together nine artists to think about paradise as an idea people keep chasing, remembering and remaking. With Lina Vincent as curatorial advisor, the exhibition looks at the distance between promise and reality through painting, photography, textile, embroidery, sculpture and kinetic work.

Kodanda Rao Teppala’s Nature of Paradise paintings turn beaches, roads and open landscapes into slightly uneasy spaces. Tiny human figures appear against broad fields of colour, sand and textured paint. Rekha Hebbar Rao’s Where Hope Blooms places a bright bird-of-paradise flower against a harder mountain landscape, making hope feel present but fragile.

Memory and place run through several works. Digbijayee Khatua’s small paper works speak of home, silence and unclaimed land, while Dhiraj Pednekar’s Living Archives of Salogra uses terracotta, papier-mâché, sand, wire and steel mesh to preserve fragments of landscape and memory. Veer Munshi’s Story of a Hangul brings the endangered Kashmir stag into a scene marked by both beauty and loss.

Elsewhere, Sheena Maria Piedade’s punch-needle works resemble soft, organic forms, while Akshata Mokashi’s large textiles turn river, land and memory into woven landscapes. Shailesh B R’s Philosophy Machine 2.0, a large kinetic sculpture, pushes the show into a very different register. Together, the works suggest that paradise may be less a perfect place than something shaped by memory, desire and the fear of losing what we value.

Part 2 of our series on contemporary essay writers, curated by Teju Cole is the kind of essayist who makes you question...
14/09/2026

Part 2 of our series on contemporary essay writers, curated by

Teju Cole is the kind of essayist who makes you question the act of looking itself. A photograph, a city street, a museum, a journey, in his writing, none of these is ever just what it first appears to be. He is interested in what we see, but even more in what history, power and memory have taught us to see.

Born to Nigerian parents and raised in Lagos, Cole moves easily between photography, travel, literature, race, colonial history and politics. In Known and Strange Things, he moves from James Baldwin and W.G. Sebald to photographs and African politics without losing the thread. What connects it all is his curiosity about how we make sense of the world around us. Black Paper is a darker book, written in the shadow of political violence, racism and historical amnesia.

13/09/2026

The Anatomy of Wonder at Anant Art, Safdarjung Enclave, looks at Surrealism through five very different practices by Aditya Puthur, Anikesa Dhing, Dhiraj Rabha, Laxmipriya Panigrahi and Tito Stanley S.J. The show evokes dreams, memory, the body, folklore and unease, using Surrealism as a way of looking at present-day fears around identity, displacement, ecology and the strange turns of everyday life.

Aditya Puthur’s dark, blue-green paintings are quite unsettling. Beds, bodies, doctors and shadowy figures appear in scenes that feel somewhere between a hospital memory and a bad dream. Anikesa Dhing takes the opposite route, using bright colours and familiar objects (beds, stools, shoes, lamps) but making them appear in ways that feel slightly wrong. Dhiraj Rabha’s works bring in memory, violence and community histories, while his installation in the darkened room has an eerie beauty that stays with you.

The mood changes again with Laxmipriya Panigrahi and Tito Stanley S.J. Panigrahi builds dense, dreamlike landscapes filled with animals, plants and strange light, drawing from miniature traditions and Odisha’s visual culture. Tito’s paintings are richer and more physical, packed with flowers, vegetation and solitary figures that seem to belong to a place and yet remain apart from it. The exhibition, directed by Mamta Singhania and Darpana Capoor, works best when it lets these worlds remain slightly unresolved. You are not asked to decode everything. You are simply allowed to enter, look and feel a little off-balance.

Macros, a new Indian brand, takes skin fitness rather seriously. It divides skin health into five “macros”: hydration, d...
13/09/2026

Macros, a new Indian brand, takes skin fitness rather seriously. It divides skin health into five “macros”: hydration, defence, detox, protein and repair. More importantly, it has built its basic routine around two products: an Active Concentrate Multi-Action Face Gel for the morning and Recovery Concentrate Serum-Soaked Wipes for night. The brand says the two together are meant to address all five of those areas. That sounded manageable enough for me.

I started with the Recovery Concentrate Serum-Soaked Wipes, because these are probably the more unusual of the two. Each pack contains 30 individual wipes, and the instruction is wonderfully uncomplicated: open one before bed, swipe it over the face and neck and leave the serum on. No rinsing afterwards. Macros positions it as a cleanser, moisturiser and serum in one, with ingredients including micellar water, aloe vera, glycerine, bakuchiol, calendula, gotu kola, panthenol and liquorice-root extract.

Review by Nawaid Anjum Macros

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In this conversation with Nawaid Anjum around her book, ‘Courting Equality’, Mihira Sood talks about Mathura and Rameeza...
12/09/2026

In this conversation with Nawaid Anjum around her book, ‘Courting Equality’, Mihira Sood talks about Mathura and Rameeza Bee, Shah Bano, the UCC, Sabarimala, marital r**e, dowry, MeToo, POSH, women in the judiciary and why representation still matters

Mihira Sood’s Courting Equality: Landmark Cases in the Battle for Women’s Rights (Juggernaut) is about the distance between what the law promises and what women actually live through. Across r**e, marriage, religion, work, speech and political participation, she keeps returning to the same problem: a good law or a progressive judgment can change the terms of an argument, but it cannot by itself change the society in which that law has to work. The book travels from Mathura — a young tribal girl in Maharashtra who was sexually assaulted in custody in 1972, triggering nationwide protests and leading to historic reforms in Indian r**e laws — and Shah Bano to sexual harassment, MeToo, misogyny online, constitutional morality and Sabarimala before ending with what Sood calls an “unfinished revolution”.

That’s where our conversation begins. I ask Sood what, after looking back over half a century, she believes the law has actually achieved. “One of the central themes of the book is the gap between the promise of the law and what it has actually achieved,” she says. But she does not give up on law. In a country marked by deep inequalities of power and access, “the power of the law cannot be ignored. The law has immense reformatory and regulatory power. And while it may not always be the perfect tool, it is perhaps the strongest tool we have at our disposal.”

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For all its fame, Hyderabadi food is still surprisingly easy to reduce to a few familiar dishes. Mention it and the mind...
12/09/2026

For all its fame, Hyderabadi food is still surprisingly easy to reduce to a few familiar dishes. Mention it and the mind tends to go first to biryani, haleem and mirchi ka salan, and to a cuisine generous with chilli and spice. That familiar picture, however, leaves out a great deal. Hyderabad’s old aristocratic families had their own kitchens, recipes and ways of cooking; the food of the Salar Jungs, the Paigahs or the Asaf Jahs was not simply one interchangeable ‘Hyderabadi cuisine’.

Much of this food was cooked within these homes for generations before it found its way onto the menus of five-star hotels. ‘The Royal Tables of Hyderabad,’ a three-day pop-up at Chor Bizarre in Delhi from September 4 to 6 in collaboration with Heirloom Kitchen, offered a rare chance to eat from one of those traditions: the food of the Salar Jung household.

Chef Kulsum Begum, a niece of Nawab Mir Yousuf Ali Khan — commonly known as Salar Jung III, who served as Prime Minister of Hyderabad Deccan during the reign of the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan — was raised in a family in which daughters were not taught the recipes because they would marry into other families. It was the daughters-in-law who were expected to inherit them.

She persuaded her ‘nanna’ (maternal grandmother), Buggo Begum, to teach her, and after marriage with Mohammad Amir Naqi Khan took her to the Mahmudabad family in Uttar Pradesh, she found herself missing the sharper, sourer (as compared to the more restrained Awadhi cooking of her new home) flavours she had grown up with in Hyderabad.

She began cooking those dishes at home, initially for her husband’s friends and guests, who soon started looking forward to the meals. What began as private dinners gradually ended up in professional kitchens; by the early 2000s, she was presenting Salar Jung food at hotel festivals and training chefs in the recipes and techniques she had learnt in the family.

✍️ Nawaid Anjum

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has spent more than three decades slipping into lives that rarely resemble one another. Bhiku Mhatre, Professor Siras,...
11/09/2026

has spent more than three decades slipping into lives that rarely resemble one another. Bhiku Mhatre, Professor Siras, Sardar Khan, Srikant Tiwari, P.C. Solanki — each belongs to a different world, and Bajpayee has somehow managed to make us forget the actor we already know while watching them.

His latest role in Last Man in Tower, directed by and based on the novel by Aravind Adiga, takes him in yet another direction. He plays Masterji, an ageing retired teacher who refuses to sell his home when everyone around him is ready to move on. He is stubborn, difficult and increasingly isolated — exactly the sort of character Bajpayee seems drawn to, someone whose choices are not always easy to agree with.

His own road to this point was anything but smooth. From Belwa in Bihar to Delhi theatre, repeated rejection from the National School of Drama, small roles and uncertain years in Mumbai, there was a long stretch before Satya changed the conversation around him. Even then, he resisted being boxed into one kind of performance. Shool, Aligarh, Gangs of Wasseypur, Bhonsle, Joram Jugnu, and Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai kept showing a different man.

Streaming has brought him another generation of viewers through The Family Man, but fame has not made his choices safer. That may be the most interesting thing about Manoj Bajpayee today: after all these years, he still seems more interested in becoming somebody else than in protecting the idea of being a star.

Read mnm ’s piece on thepunchmagazine.com

11/09/2026

At the preview of Ngok Dolu (My Village) at Gallery Vayu, designer and artist Jenjum Gadi brings together more than 30 new works that return to the Arunachal Pradesh of his childhood. The show is built out of memory, but it does not feel nostalgic in an obvious way. Gadi goes back to the things he grew up seeing closely: bamboo houses, fields, birds, fruit, vegetables, animals, clouds and the everyday rhythms of village life.

He then translates these familiar forms into brass, a material that immediately changes the way we look at them. A bunch of bananas, a cluster of leaves or a village home seem to get a sense of permanence. What might otherwise be an ordinary remembered detail becomes something you stop in front of and look at again.

The larger works hold your attention longest. Some are almost like landscapes pieced together from memory, with homes inside dense foliage, birds moving through the frame and clouds curling above them. Elsewhere, Gadi isolates objects and forms, allowing fruit, crops or domestic details to stand on their own. There is a lot happening on the surface and you can sense the hand in it, the labour of hammering and shaping metal, but also the patience of someone trying to remember correctly.

Brass is central to his work because so much of what he is recalling is vulnerable to time and change. The places, materials and ways of life he remembers may not remain exactly as they were, but in these works they are held still for a moment. The show is on view through September 30. Gallery Vayu is the curatorial initiative of Vayu: Design for Living; it was founded by designer and entrepreneur Vivek Sahni, who also founded K**a Ayurveda in 2002.

10/09/2026

A new show, -Rhythm, curated by Andrea Anastasio and Roobina Karode , at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art , brings Bice Lazzari and Nasreen Mohamedi together through a shared interest in line, rhythm, repetition and space. They came from different places, generations and histories, but both developed highly individual forms of abstraction. Walking through the show, you begin to see how rhythm lies at the centre of their work. Lazzari works with colour, texture and gesture; Mohamedi pares things down until line, light and space seem enough.

Here, you can see Lazzari’s Acrilico n. 23 from 1977. . The large grey field is crossed by fine white lines, broken into bands and blocks that seem measured and not rigid. The run of warm red-orange near the bottom, changes the balance of the painting. A few small black marks, the pale horizontal lines and the central white-and-red form keep the eye moving. It feels a little like looking at a musical score when you cannot hear the music but can still sense its pace: repetition, interruption, pause, another beat.

Seen within In-Rhythm, the painting also helps explain why Lazzari and Mohamedi work so well together. Both gave great importance to intervals: the spaces between one line and the next, the pattern breaks, where empty space begins to matter. Lazzari’s use of colour gives her work a very different mood, but the discipline beneath it finds a strong echo in Mohamedi’s spare geometry. You do not come away thinking the two artists were alike. You come away seeing how two very different practices found their own precise ways of making rhythm visible.

✍️ Nawaid Anjum

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