There is no one way to love. This new anthology of non-fiction stories about love and sex from Agents of Ishq shows how romance and intimacy can mean wildly different things to people
Agents Of Ishq started out as a sex-ed portal with videos like this one, ‘Ishq ke Garden Mein Marzi Hai Minimum’, explaining consent. Pic/Agents of Ishq
What is a love story? You’re likely already hearing mandolins in your head and picturing a boy and girl in mustard fields. But it can also be the sweet reminiscence of the first time having sex with a college sweetheart. It can be a boy and a girl standing in the rain, one of them shyly handing over a love letter, while the other musters the courage to tell her he is gay. Sometimes it’s the joy of discovering female friendship and self-love, at other times it’s accepting that friendships can be romantic and sensual too.
Every story in Love, Sex and India (Westland, R399), an anthology of short narratives from the Agents of Ishq (AOI), evades conventional ideas of romance and intimacy. The stories — all first-person, non-fiction accounts and edited by Paromita Vohra, filmmaker, writer and founder of AOI — are pulled from the repository of Agents of Ishq, a digital media project which recently marked its 10-year anniversary in December 2025. It had launched in 2015 with the dream of bringing sex-positive conversation to the mainstream. A decade on, AOI’s Instagram page (@agentsofishq) has nearly 44,000 followers, and hundreds of posts about all matters of the heart, from sex and masturbation, to friendship and heartbreak, to kink and situationships, to even grim accounts of sexual assault and exploitation. Each of these stories has been volunteered by AOI followers, sharing their most intimate memories that defy binaries and taboo.
Cover art for Love, Sex and India by Anshumaan Sathe
“The book shows you a spectrum of experiences in intimate lives — we have a very expansive definition of desire at Agents of Ishq. So these are really emotional journeys, sexual journeys, journeys of friendship, all kinds of journeys of intimate life. It gives you a real window into what’s been happening in Indian intimacy for the last 10 years,” says Vohra.
“There’s also something reflective in reading so many personal stories in one place. I think it helps the reader to also locate themselves somewhere in that universe,” she adds.
When Vohra started AOI a decade ago, it was meant to be a space for sex education on the Internet. Never did she anticipate that it would grow into the archive of real-life stories it is today. In the beginning, she recalls, there had been many naysayers who told her that the concept would never work, that Indians did not like to talk so frankly about sex.
“But just a day after we launched, we got so many emails from people who shared their own stories with us, saying they too wanted to be an agent of ishq,” says Vohra.
They never solicited stories from anyone, and it was painstaking work to edit the pieces sensitively, each piece sometimes taking up to a month to edit. “To pay deep attention to something is an act of love.
When you read these stories, you will notice there’s no judgment of others. I remember a young man who sent us a story in which the first line was, ‘I joined Grindr and everybody knows Grindr is for losers’.
Paromita Vohra
We changed that to, ‘I joined Grindr and it made me feel like a loser’. The difference between these two lines is tremendous; one is a judgmental line that speaks for everybody else, the other is merely about how he feels.”
From the hundreds of stories published over the years, Vohra chose the stories which she feels “leave you thinking a little bit about your own life, even if your life is very different from the story”. “It’s not about whether you have had the exact same experience, or you share the same identity. Reading somebody else’s experience that’s shared thoughtfully and honestly, allows you to connect with that person, irrespective of identity,” she adds.
Some of Vohra’s favourite stories from the collection are ‘More than an identity: How I realised my struggle was with being sexual, not homosexual’, an account of how her personal journey of exploring her queer identity often took a backseat to the politics of representation and visibility. She also loved the story ‘I took a nude selfie. It changed my life’. Vohra further cites the chapters ‘I have erotic friendships and it’s not complicated’, and ‘This is who I am’, which is about a man discovering he is kinky. “I also love ‘The women who bathed together’ and ‘My mother’s lost friendships’. They are beautiful, poignant stories,” says Vohra.
When AOI first started, online sex education was barely a thing. In the 10 years since, a lot has changed. The Internet is now where we date and where we learn more about sex from hugely popular sex-positive influencers. “Agents of Ishq started that,” Vohra says with pride, “It’s what kept us going over the years even when things got tough. So many people — especially from small towns — wrote to us saying that AOI had helped them feel less alone.”
“And that really is the fundamental need of human beings — to not feel lonely. To be lonely is to not feel at home with yourself, to always be hiding yourself from yourself. I’m glad we gave so many people a place they could feel at home.”
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
