Capturing the Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life....

Academic brochures once foregrounded ideas. Today, they foreground faces. When did scholarship become a visual spectacle—and what does it say about power, visibility, and expertise in academia? When Ideas Need Faces: The Rise of Academic Visual Spectacle This blog emerges from an unease I have been carrying for a while—one that crystallised only recently. It is about how the culture of digital visual spectacle has quietly but firmly entered academic spaces, especially in the post-pandemic world. Most of us are familiar with academic brochures announcing seminars, conferences, invited lectures, and workshops. There was a time—not too long ago—when these brochures focused on the idea: the theme of the event, the names of invited scholars, their institutional affiliations, and the titles of their talks. That was the grammar of academic publicity. But today, there is a new, almost unquestioned addition to this space of supposed intellectual deliberation: the photograph of the speaker. ...

Why do men survive heat, knives, and 14-hour shifts in hotel kitchens—but freeze at the sight of a gas stove at home? Because masculinity doesn’t fear labour. It fears care. This piece is about how cooking becomes masculine only when it brings power, visibility, and status—and why equality is far more threatening than fire. If Masculinity Can Survive Heat, Knives and Long Hours in Hotel Kitchens, Why Does it Collapse at the Sight of a Gas Stove at Home? Because the danger masculinity fears is not heat or knives—but the loss of privilege. A hotel kitchen does not threaten masculinity; a home kitchen does. The difference lies not in labour, skill, or effort, but in what cooking means in each space. In a hotel, cooking is power without care. In a home, cooking is care without power. Masculinity survives where cooking brings: Authority over others Public recognition Wages and status Distance from emotional responsibility A hotel kitchen is hierarchical, competitive, and visible....

This blog reflects on the curious comfort society finds in older women’s voices in Kerala—a comfort often misread as feminist progress. I argue instead that this late-life acceptance betrays a deeper patriarchal anxiety. Drawing on feminist theory, I suggest that menopause operates as a socio-political threshold: women become audible only after their bodies are stripped of sexual threat and social unease. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, this blog tried to negotiate with how legitimacy is unevenly distributed among women based on caste, marital status, and compliance with normative femininity. Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective regulation explains why youthful women are marked as disruptive, while Judith Butler’s performativity helps frame menopause as a reconfiguration of gendered intelligibility. Dalit feminist critiques further expose the caste limits of this acceptance, revealing respectability as an exclusionary economy rather than a universal reward. Women a...

In Kerala, a woman turning twenty is rarely allowed the luxury of being just twenty. Instead, her age becomes a question—posed not to her, but to astrologers, doctors, neighbours, and extended family. The question is never about her aspirations, her intellectual curiosities, or the life she imagines for herself. It is always about marriage—and urgency. This essay reflects on a disturbing social choreography where astrology and selective medical science join hands to discipline women’s timelines. It examines how fear masquerades as care, how ambition is framed as risk, and how even the most educated societies reproduce an iron ceiling so thick that women are prevented not only from breaking through—but from even imagining what lies beyond. When the Stars, the Womb, and Society Conspire: The Iron Ceiling Over Women’s Lives in Kerala In many Kerala households, a daughter turning twenty is not merely a marker of adulthood; it is treated as a deadline. Her horoscope is taken to an astrolog...