Reading Still Standing by Karan Gauba Left Me a Bit Undone

Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.3 out of 5)

I started Still Standing on a Tuesday evening after a day that had nothing dramatic in it, just the usual mess of deadlines and half finished cups of chai, and by the third poem I had put my phone face down on the table. That does not happen often. In my years at Deified Publication I have read more poetry manuscripts than I can count, and most of them ask you to admire the language before they ask you to feel anything. Karan Gauba’s debut does the opposite. It opens with a poem called “Inheritance,” about a son who is appointed rather than simply born into a family, told he carries strength long before he is allowed to fracture, and within a page I was thinking about my own family’s expectations, the ones nobody says out loud but everyone somehow understands anyway.

What the book is about

Still Standing is Karan Gauba’s debut poetry collection, and it reads less like a set of individual poems and more like a life laid out in order. It moves from childhood and family expectation into the money pressure of adulthood, through a stretch of career struggle, into a period where the narrator’s family business appears to fall apart, then into the relationships that carried him through it, marriage, children, a sister he clearly adores, and a loss that sits underneath the later half of the book without ever being spelled out in clinical detail. Karan Gauba works in business development and recruitment solutions professionally, and honestly, you can feel that background in how precisely he writes about money, targets, and the specific humiliation of financial pressure. This is not vague, dreamy poetry about feelings in general. It is rooted in EMIs, foreclosure penalties, and the particular sound a bank makes when it approves your loan and starts owning a piece of your future.

What stood out to me

There is a poem simply called “EMI” that I keep thinking about. Karan Gauba writes about how freedom adjusts its definition once you sign for a house or a car, how the neighbourhood looks respectable while the walls are still being paid off, how the bank smiles politely while interest compounds without any emotion attached to it at all. I have read a fair amount of poetry about ambition and very little that gets this specific about what ambition actually costs on paper. It is the kind of detail that only comes from having lived it, not researched it.

Right after that comes “Night Shift,” which might be my favorite piece in the whole collection. At twenty, the narrator describes sleep as optional and hunger as anything but, attending lectures by day with borrowed attention and working call center hours by night, selling confidence to strangers across time zones, learning accents and patience while saying “good evening, sir” as morning breaks outside his own window. That line, where it’s morning where he’s sitting but evening for the person on the other end of the call, is such a small detail, and it says more about the hustle culture of that generation than a full essay could.

Then there’s a shift in the book where the narrator’s father starts appearing more, and this is where Karan Gauba’s writing gets genuinely affecting. In “When the Factory Fell,” he describes how a business does not collapse dramatically, it fades, orders arrive slower, phone calls last longer, and his father starts staring at numbers the way you’d watch a storm approaching from a distance. A few pages later there’s a scene I won’t forget anytime soon, where the narrator remembers one evening watching his father sit alone at the dining table long after everyone else had left, moving his fingers across a calculator like it might eventually show him mercy, bills resting on the table like guests nobody invited. He writes that his father did not say anything, there was no shouting, no confession of fear, just an unspoken shift that happened inside the narrator himself, and that this was the evening his childhood quietly ended without any ceremony to mark it. I don’t say this lightly, but that poem is doing something a lot of poetry tries and fails to do. It makes an ordinary, undramatic moment feel like the hinge an entire life turned on.

The book also has real warmth running through it, mostly through the poems about his sister. He writes about her as part guardian, part teacher, part friend, the gentlest version of a mother’s love he had access to, someone who defended him before he even understood he needed defending. There’s a nickname, “Karnya,” that she used for him, and Karan Gauba returns to that single word more than once across the collection, treating it almost like a thread stitching the whole book together. By the time it shows up again near the end, tied to illness and loss, it lands very differently than it did the first time you read it.

The emotional core

I won’t pretend the middle stretch of this book is an easy read. There’s a section where the narrator describes sitting with someone through uncertain, frightening days of illness, where every conversation feels fragile and he admits plainly that time does not heal certain losses, it only teaches you how to live beside them. I found myself putting the book down for a minute after that one, not because it’s overwritten, but because it isn’t. Karan Gauba doesn’t reach for big dramatic language here. He just states what happened and lets it sit there, which somehow makes it land harder.

What balances that weight is the writing about becoming a father himself later in the book, holding his daughters and realizing, in his words, that life had trusted him with something greater than ambition. After everything the book has walked you through, from EMIs to a father’s silent worry to loss, arriving at that image feels earned rather than sentimental.

Who this book is for

If you grew up in a family where love and responsibility got tangled together early, where financial pressure shaped your twenties as much as anything else did, this collection is going to feel uncomfortably familiar in the best way. Readers who enjoy poets writing about ordinary middle class Indian life, career pressure, family duty, and quiet resilience, will find a lot to connect with here. I’ll be honest though, if you prefer poetry that’s more abstract or metaphor heavy, this might feel plainer than you’re used to. Karan Gauba’s style is direct almost to the point of being conversational, and that’s either going to be exactly what you want or not quite your taste. There’s no in between with a style this stripped down.

Final thoughts

Still Standing is not a flawless collection. A few poems toward the middle cover similar emotional ground to ones that came before them, and if you read the whole thing in one sitting like I did, that repetition is noticeable. I also think a reader picking this up expecting something purely uplifting given the title should know upfront that a good portion of this book sits in genuinely difficult territory before it earns its resilience. But as a debut, this is remarkably assured. Karan Gauba writes about inheritance, debt, overwork, a father’s unspoken fear, a sister’s love, and loss, and somehow makes all of it feel like one continuous, honest life rather than a scattered collection of themes. I finished it thinking about my own family’s silences, which is about the highest compliment I can give a book like this.

FAQs

Is Still Standing by Karan Gauba worth reading?

If you connect with poetry rooted in real, specific life detail rather than abstract imagery, yes, it’s absolutely worth your time.

Who should read Still Standing?

Readers interested in family dynamics, financial pressure, and resilience narratives, especially anyone who grew up in a close knit or joint family household.

What is Still Standing about?

It’s Karan Gauba’s debut poetry collection tracing one life from childhood expectation through financial hardship, career struggle, family loss, and eventual resilience.

Is this a heavy read?

Parts of it are, particularly the sections dealing with a father’s financial stress and a later loss, but the book ends on an earned, grounded note rather than a bleak one.