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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.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
06/07/2025
Some mornings arrive like a sentence half-formed — open, unhurried, waiting to be finished. There’s no need to rush when the coffee is dark, the blanket or the duvet still warm, and the books splayed out in that just-read way. The laptop hums quietly, surrounded by the clutter that creativity often leaves behind. It’s evidence — of thought, of pause, of a life lived in drafts.
This is where The Punch Magazine belongs — in the folds of mornings like these, where stories, essays, poems and photographs don’t interrupt your day, but slip into it gently. Between the steam of a cup and the margin of a page, offers a kind of editorial companionship that notices and listens. Whether it’s fiction that stirs or essays that spark, this is a magazine for the ones who mark time with words.
So if your idea of a perfect morning includes reading something that reminds you of language’s quiet power — not to overwhelm, but to connect — you’re already in the right place. Come with the coffee. Stay for the sentences. The Punch Magazine is on your desk, ans by your side.
30/06/2025
There are certain kind of morning or evening, day or night when time doesn’t rush you. The coffee cools slowly. The pages stay open a little longer. And something — a phrase, a colour, a design — slips into your mind and stays with you.
The Punch Magazine is created in that spirit. Where literature and aesthetics meet with no urgency to explain themselves. We curate contemporary fiction, poetry, travel pieces, interiors, and essays that pause for breath and give room to thought. Whether you’re drawn to a passage of prose, a photograph of a sunlit hallway, or the fine tension of a handwritten line, you’ll find something that you’d like to hold on to for a long, long while.
It’s not about trends or what everyone is doing. It’s about atmosphere. And in a world that often demands speed, here’s your reminder that reading — like good coffee — works best when unhurried.
30/06/2025
Not everything meaningful needs to be loud. On a quiet desk, with a blank tablet and a half-thought scribble, something essential begins to stir. It could be a story you haven’t written yet, a line of verse still forming, or an idea waiting to be held gently in your hand. In the background: the hum of a keyboard, the stillness of a white page, and a kind of silence that asks nothing from you except presence.
The Punch Magazine was imagined for such moments — deliberate, open, and alive to the texture of thought. We bring together contemporary writing and art across genres — fiction, essays, poetry, design, travel, and culture — for readers who don’t want to rush the act of reading. For creators who know that what matters is often quiet and slow. We’re inviting conversation — over time, across disciplines, and in tune with a more mindful way of engaging with the world.
So whether you find us over coffee, between edits, or during that mid-afternoon lull when ideas come uninvited, know that we’re here — in print, online, and in spirit — to be part of your creative rhythm. This isn’t content for the algorithm. It’s nourishment for those who pause, reflect, and create.
29/06/2025
Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 film Umrao Jaan, which re-released in theatres on June 27 in a 4K restoration, is adapted from Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s late 19th-century novel Umrao Jaan Ada. The film is set in mid-1800s Lucknow, in the final flicker of the Nawabi era, a time of crumbling opulence, dying etiquette, and the fading aroma of a refined culture soon to be overrun by British modernity and masculine nationalism.
Amiran, a young girl abducted from her home in Faizabad and sold to a Lucknow kotha, grows up to become the legendary courtesan and poet Umrao Jaan (Rekha). She dances, writes, seduces, loves, and is ultimately left to survive with nothing but her verse. However, to reduce the film to that are is to miss its entire method. This is not a bildungsroman. It’s an extended lament. Ali’s gaze is steadier, more fatalistic. He makes a film that moves like grief.
Umrao Jaan is a portrait of suspended melancholy, of beauty in captivity. What Ali offers is neither revisionist feminism nor romantic glorification. Instead, Umrao Jaan becomes an elegy: to a culture, to a woman, and to the idea of belonging itself. His directorial approach is radically restrained.
To say that Rekha is the soul of Umrao Jaan would be accurate but inadequate. She inhabits the role through her body, her gaze, her restraint. It is one of those rare performances that does not rely on dialogue or narrative momentum but lives entirely in the spaces between words, in the flicker of an eyelid, the elongation of a pause, the turn of a wrist as she breaks into a ghazal.
The Punch Magazine is a space for the curious. It moves between poetry and essays, fiction and interiors, travel and everyday design. It’s for those who don’t compartmentalise their interests — who think slowly, read widely, and take pleasure in detail.
On your screen, between deadlines or design drafts, between tabs or tea breaks, we offer writing that holds your attention without demanding it. With each issue, The Punch builds an archive of thought, taste, and imagination — for anyone drawn to the places where ideas live with feeling.
29/06/2025
You know that quiet hour between work and dinner, or late into the night when the world falls silent and your mind begins to wander? That’s when The Punch Magazine finds you best. From a poem that stays with you longer than expected to an interview that opens a window you didn’t know was shut — this is a place where literature, culture, interiors, photography, and travel are not separate sections but one flowing conversation.
We don’t chase trends. We follow moods, moments, and meaning. Our stories are made for the browser who is not in a tearing hurry, the reader who savours, and the wanderer who reads with a cup of something beside them, relishing both. Wherever you are, whenever you’re ready, The Punch is waiting with something worth your attention.
29/06/2025
Evenings on Sundays are for unhurried scrolling, legs curled into cushions, and discovering writing that wins your heart. The Punch Magazine brings that feeling to life — whether it’s through a short story that unfolds like dusk, an interview that breathes space into your thoughts, or a photo essay that captures the in-between moments most people miss. In our world, storytelling is like music played low.
So, when the light dims and you’re looking for something richer than a quick click — come here. Wander through poetry, linger on stories about the interiors, lose yourself in essays about longing, art, memory, travel. At The Punch Magazine, we create moods and memories. And maybe it’s time we all drawn on all these int a little more.
Tell us: what have you read lately that stayed with you or may be made you go back to your iPad or your writing desk?
24/06/2025
In Materialists, Celine Song sets up what looks like a familiar situation: Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a New York-based matchmaker — working with a high‑end firm called Adore — who has an impeccable taste and an even sharper sense of control, finds herself entangled with two very different men: Harry, a wealthy, composed billionaire (Pedro Pascal), and John, her ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans), a caterer who still carries the texture of their past relationship. On the surface, it’s a classic romantic triangle: one man offering stability and status, the other tethered to memory, hunger, and unfinished emotional business. But Song isn’t really interested in the suspense of who Lucy will end up with. Instead, she zooms in on how intimacy feels in each case: what it stirs, what it conceals, what it demands.
The film opens with a bit of prehistoric roleplay — two cavemen giving each other gifts, flowers and tools — as if to remind us that this exchange, the trade of affection for safety or power or food, is ancient. But it’s only in our time that the exchange has been so thoroughly aestheticised, rebranded, gamified. And Lucy is a master player. Her silken rhetoric and measured voice mask a mind that literally treats love like a ledger, clients assigned numbers, heights, incomes, career titles as though tickers on Bloomberg. She has brokered nine marriages from her agency, which is marketed like a boutique investment fund, already. And the ticker of success keeps rising, but she remains an “eternal bachelorette” because Lucy herself is unavailable to the very calculus she champions, until Harry appears at a client’s wedding.
Read the review in . Link in bio
19/06/2025
A quiet table, a porcelain cup, a magazine folded at a moment worth remembering. The world may rush, but here, time holds its breath. This is where The Punch Magazine belongs — in those in-between spaces where reflection lives. Our stories are not scrollable. They are meant to be sipped, like thick coffee on a wooden terrace. In every issue, you’ll find essays that ask questions without rushing for answers, fiction that doesn’t bend to genre, and images that linger long after the page is turned. It’s not about what’s trending. It’s about what lasts.
Whether you’re into art, interiors, poetry, or travel that doesn’t feel packaged — we’re here for the seekers, the lingerers, the ones who pause. We invite you to read like you mean it. And tell us — what does beauty mean to you today?
18/06/2025
There’s something magnetic about objects that have measured time long before our phones did. These old clocks, with their tarnished brass, cracked glass, and uneven ticks, testify to years when time moved differently. The hands moved a tad noisily, the alarms were sudden and jarring, and the ritual of winding them was a daily reminder that time was something you actively participated in, not something that simply swept past you.
Spread across this pale surface like artefacts, each clock seems to have its own personality: some upright and alert, others slouched and slightly unsure. They aren’t just instruments of timekeeping; they are records of habit, routine, delay, longing, and anticipation. These were the companions of exam mornings, of lovers waiting for letters, of workers rising before dawn. Looking at them now is less about nostalgia and more about recognising how mechanical memory survives even when our own fails.
The clocks, thus, recall an era when we wound up our days with care, not with swipes and notifications. They speak in analogue, in a visual grammar that we at The Punch Magazine relish. We bring you stories shaped by light falling through antique blinds, essays that travel without itinerary, poems that feel like they’ve always been there. Fiction that rustles like a letter left in a drawer. Interiors that breathe. Art that touches the soul. A lifestyle that is lived and not curated. This is a magazine for readers who like taking the long way home. For those who believe a room can hold a memory, and that slowness isn’t a weakness but a way of seeing.
What’s your earliest memory of a clock like this? Share with us ⏰
The desk is where your day begins, where ideas take shape. A cup of chai, a pencil waiting to scribble, and The Punch Magazine bringing in a pot-pourri of poetry, fiction, essays and more. Everything has its own little role.
What’s always on your desk? A book? Your favourite snack? That one pen you never lose? Tell us in the comments or share a photo. We’d love to see your desk vibes too!
Here’s a fresh set of hashtags inspired by this clean, creative workspace vibe — perfect for a calm and productive writing or reading day:
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Our Story
The Punch Magazine is an initiative by Punch Art and Culture Foundation that endeavours to promote arts and literary and cultural traditions around the world. It was founded by Shireen Quadri, who is the director of the foundation. A monthly digital magazine of arts, literature and culture, The Punch Magazine features in-depth essays, reviews and interviews.
The magazine has been conceived as a collective, a community of people bound by similar interests. It aims to showcase the best in arts, literature, entertainment, fashion, lifestyle, hospitality, travel and tourism. Striving to achieve exacting standards of excellence, the magazine brings together the best of all creative efforts, underlining its core belief that these efforts are all connected and the process of creating good arts is similar across disciplines.
Alongside original long-form and quick-read content (exclusive excerpts, interviews and essays), it is designed to showcase the best writings, videos and voices — emerging, established and experimental — from across the globe through a wide network of our literary and cultural partners, both individuals and institutions.
The Byword, one of the sections of The Punch Magazine — earlier a quarterly magazine of literature, arts and culture, both in print and online — was started in 2015. It was reinvented in 2016 as The Punch Magazine. Since then, it has emerged as a one-of-its-kind platform that showcases the richness and diversity of arts and literature around the world. It has earned high praise from a cross-section of award-winning writers and artists.
In the age of shrinking space for arts and culture, and increasingly shorter attention span, we often sail against the wind, but our conviction and passion are our best guides and help us keep going. At The Punch Magazine, we are forever looking for fresh ideas to reinvent ourselves, and stories of people, places and things that need to be told. If you believe in the magazine, you, too, can be a part of our journey — no matter who you are and where you are from.
What also keeps us going is a little help from those who share our passion. If you are one of them, do consider helping this society of aesthetes to grow. Send in your donations. Choose any amount you wish to donate. Donations can be transferred online to Punch Art & Culture Foundation, Account No: 919010036898613, Axis Bank, IFSC Code; UTIB0000715
