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THE
VERTICAL

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Volume 2
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The Vertical

Books & Arts

Devotion by Design

Community

Fiction & Poetry

Features

Interactive

Khabristan
Provocations on Empathy
Spiritually Chic
LIFE ON LINE
The Citizen's Vote
Speaking Through the Subaltern

LATEST

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mourning in schizophrenic time
LAHORE
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Devotion by Design
KASHMIR
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Voices of Roj
MALDIVES

VOL 2. ISSUE 1

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“Euphemisms and doublespeak concealed disappearance at an unprecedented transnational scope.”

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Resistance Until Return

For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music.
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Palestinian-American actor and playwright Sadieh Rifai confronts the mental toll of occupation, war, and the American dream in her world premiere, The Cave.
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“Food organization at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment began as the effort of just seven students organizing the chaotic assortment on the tarp, but it quickly evolved into a network attracting several student groups, professors, community members, and even other encampments, including the NYU and City College encampments.”
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Fugitive Ecologies

Lima's Forsaken
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Paean to Mother Nature
Cracks in Pernote
Sinking the Body Politic
During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy.
Gardening at the End of the World
Descendants of enslaved and indentured labourers cultivated life amidst the ruins of climate catastrophe in nineteenth-century Mauritius. Today, deforestation and the sugar industry have left a legacy of natural disasters and public health crises. What path forward remains for the unification of the political and scientific in service of the island’s labouring population?

An internationalist, leftist literary magazine seeking an activist approach to representation.

Colophon inspired by Rabindranath

Tagore's "Head Study"

Bibi Hajra’s Spaces of Belonging
An architect and painter narrates an authentic story of place at Bibian Pak Daman.
Four Lives
"How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then?  Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have?"
Zohran Kwame Mamdani on Palestine in 2021
“I really got into organizing through the Palestinian solidarity movement. I co-founded my school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The same people who used to walk by me in the student union when we were organizing for an academic boycott—those same people have reached out to me since to say they wish they had gotten involved, that they feel differently now. Really, the Black Lives Matter movement opened a lot of people's eyes to the interconnectedness of state violence.”
On the Relationship between Form & Resistance
A Dhivehi Artists Showcase
Chats Ep. 6 · Imagery of the Baloch Movement
The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir
Bengali Nationalism & the Chittagong Hill Tracts
Photo Kathmandu & Public History in Nepal
“Welcome! Models politicians auto drivers butchers bankers accountants actors liars cheat saints masters slaves herpes gonorrhea HIV syphilis tops bottoms bottoms who top tops who bottom preferably top miserably bottom white black pink yellow brown blue high caste low caste no caste...”
"There was no one else in the four-berth compartment. I was comfortable. Somewhere near the Andhra-Orissa border I woke up and found everything dark. The train wasn’t moving either. Pitch dark. You couldn’t see anything out of the window."
A Premonition; Recollected

Rubble as Rule

Speaking Through the Subaltern
Cracks in Pernote
Bulldozing Democracy
Since his electoral victory in 2014, Narendra Modi’s Hindutva brigade has attempted to render Muslims invisible through hypervisibility. Mob-lynchings "don’t just happen” to Muslims. Thook Jihad is to be expected. By applying microscopic, misinformative attention to Muslim businesses, homes, and livelihoods throughout the country, the BJP has forced Indian Muslims to constantly create hideouts for their humanity. However, as Modi’s monumental loss in the recent Lok Sabha polls indicates, Muslims refusing to accept the social and psychological invisibilization are already leading the charge for a brighter electoral future.
The Changing Landscape of Heritage
In 2020, New Delhi’s National Museum Institute was relocated to NOIDA’s industrial outskirts and renamed the Indian Institute of Heritage. Once ideal for the study of history amidst the city’s rich heritage, this institutional shift reflects a larger trend since the rise of the Modi government in 2014, where historical studies have been politicised, censored, and shaped by majoritarian ideologies. As textbooks are altered and dissent silenced, the institute’s move from heritage-rich Delhi to a modern, industrial zone exemplifies how urban development and academia are increasingly intertwined with political agendas, raising questions about the future of historical study.
Anne Carson and Ismat Chughtai's narrative devices exemplify unreliable and ethically dubious characters that go "to the edge of what can be loved." It is an epistemic approach that rightly repudiates the commonplace idea that the purpose of fiction is to make the Other relatable.
T-Shirts
Totes
Riso Prints
COMING SOON

INTERVIEWS

The Mind is a Theater of War
The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir
Radical Rhetoric, Pedagogy & Academic Complicity
A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War
Kashmiri ProgRock and Experimentation as Privilege

From Raags to Pitches

For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music.
KOKOKO!, an experimental music collective from the DRC, has navigated political censorship and the country’s struggles with energy exploitation to create a sound that electrifies the present. Using repurposed household materials as instruments and makeshift cables for amps, they fuse French and South African house with Congolese folk to produce innovative live and stereo listening experiences. Their latest album, BUTU— “the night”—calls on audiences to bear witness to the cacophony of Kinshasa after dusk as a commentary on the political state of Congo at large.
“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.”
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