This essay reflects on Nagpur not just as a city, but as a repository of memory, longing, and belonging. Through streets, markets, and quiet-dusty corners, the author weaves observation and emotion, revealing how personal life stories shape our perspectie of the city. With a subtle gendered lens and her brother’s perspective, it reflects on how diffferently we inhabit, remember, and call a city home. Using an engaging narrative style, the author paints a realistic imagery of

This essay rides through Delhi aboard its most overlooked lifeline, the DTC buses. Far from the polished quiet of the metro, these buses pulse with the city’s chaos, humour, and reality. For the author, a transman, each journey is a lesson in both survival and selfhood. Between moments of gender euphoria and unease, he develops his own playful 'rules' for navigating this ableist, masculinist terrain, like when to board, where to sit, how to blend or stand out.

This letter is a heartfelt reflection on the author's complex relationship with Aligarh, her father’s city. As the title refelects, she reminisces the difference in how her father experienced the city and how she inherited the same through the comfort of familiarity, nostalgia of memories and belonging through its street names, food, and history. Through this letter she shares here thoughts and feelings about identity, belonging, and change—ultimately seeing Aligarh as a star

Third Position- English, Writing Contest 2025 By Muhammed Anshif City: Malappuram , Kerala Description: In this essay, the author writes...

In this essay, the author brings Kolkata alive not through the monuments, but in the everyday lives, through the artists on the streets, vendors in markets, and friendships stitched in small gestures. It is a portrait of resilience and warmth, where survival meets creativity, and the city’s true soul is found in its people. Bringing back the focus on how the place is only as good as the people in it.

This heartfelt letter to Shillong, portrayes it is as more than a city. It showcase it as an educator whose rhythms, landscapes, and communities impart enduring lessons on resilience, coexistence, and memory. Through intimate recollections of family histories, everyday practices, and collective resistance, the narrative foregrounds local voices and counter-narratives that challenge dominant notions of development and progress. In weaving personal experience with cultural insi

This year’s Youth Writing Contest brought together voices from 174 cities, each sharing how their city became a teacher in unexpected ways. Meet the winners and explore their stories.