Mehar Arora is a 16-year-old writer currently completing the IB Diploma Programme. She’s someone deeply obsessed with stories—whether they’re unfolding on screen, in a stadium, or inside someone’s heart.
Her writing explores themes of ambition, love, identity, power—and cricket. A self-proclaimed “big cricket girl,” Mehar crafts narratives where match data and romantic tension live side by side. Her dream is to shake up sports media in India and ultimately work at the highest level of the industry.
For Mehar, storytelling is about connection—making people feel seen, and sometimes even a little shaken. She’s bold, emotionally honest, and unafraid to write stories that challenge, charm, and stir something real. Mehar Arora plans to keep telling those stories—loudly, honestly, and unapologetically.
Q: What message or feeling do you hope readers take away from your poetry?
I hope my poetry gives readers permission—to feel more deeply, to admit what they’re scared to say aloud, to have somethings. A lot of my writing is born out of emotional tension—moments that are too complex to explain, so I try to distill them into an image, a rhythm, a line. If someone reads a poem and feels a little less alone in their uncertainty, or if it nudges them to sit with a feeling they’d rather avoid, then it’s done its job.
Q: Do you write more when you're happy, sad, or somewhere in between?
Definitely when I’m somewhere in between. That middle space—the stretch between joy and ache, clarity and confusion—that’s where most of my writing lives. When I’m happy, I’m too busy living in the moment; when I’m deeply sad, words feel heavy and slow. But when I’m uncertain or quietly processing something, that’s when I tend to write the most. It’s like I’m trying to make sense of things through the act of writing itself.
Q: You seem to be a lot interested in storytelling. Do you prefer writing poetry or prose? Or does it depend on the story you're telling?
It definitely depends on the story. Poetry lets me compress—capture a single feeling or thought in a small form. Prose gives me room to explore, to linger, to follow a thread until it surprises me. Some stories demand space and dialogue and tension that only prose can hold. Others need to stay delicate—and poetry gives me that. I don’t really see them as separate; they just ask different things of me.
THE BOOK
Mehar has been published in the anthology 'Hear Me First'. Curated by Delhi Poetry Slam as part of The Writer's Launchpad, an online workshop series for a select group of contemporary Indian poets. Get your copy!