No matter what or who you believe in, life can pretty much be the same hell you're trying to avoid in afterlife — or worse, who knows? But to embrace darkness and more importantly, see beauty in it requires you to be goth — a word usually synonymous with Satan, the Grim Reaper, conventional Halloween costumes and Avril Lavigne's second wedding. Today is World Goth Day — an occasion conceptualised in the United Kingdom in 2009 to celebrate the "scene". So, today is an opportunity for us to ask the question: has Mumbai goth it?

"My mother still asks me if I'm going for someone's funeral," Alisha Noronha says. Soon after she graduated from high school, Noronha developed a keen interest in goth after her introduction to rock music. In popular culture, kids who take to goth are portrayed as ones fuelled with angst — the underlying reasons are rarely delved into. "I was overweight in school and as a result, I was bullied a lot. I kept it all inside and couldn't lash out. That's how I came to like goth and something good did come out of it; I started to learn the guitar and now I play it along with bass," she shares.
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