Capturing the politics and poetics of everyday life....

Welcome to the speculative fiction of the academic world — a world where the imagination is not about new galaxies or time travel, but about creative ways to  multiply numbers ,  inflate visibility , and  outsmart metrics . In this alternate universe — which looks suspiciously like our own — scholars are not driven by curiosity alone, but by citation counts, h-indexes, and the haunting whisper of  publish or perish . When the Academic Performance Index (API) was first introduced, it promised to reward merit and transparency in higher education. But like every system designed to measure excellence, it soon began to manufacture it. In the pre-API age, teachers were scholars in the truest sense — passionate learners who read voraciously, taught with conviction, and never needed numerical validation to feel accomplished. They were moved by knowledge, not metrics; their classrooms were laboratories of thought, not arenas of performance. That era, however, has quietly fade...

There was a time when silence had a sound. When boredom was a doorway, not a burden. When we stared out of bus windows and found stories in passing faces, and clouds were the only algorithms we knew. We once lived in rhythm with pauses — the long wait for letters, the slow unfurling of books, the quiet evenings when thought had no background music. We failed, we cried, we waited — and somehow, in all that stillness, we learned who we were becoming. But the world sped up. Now, childhood scrolls instead of dreams, and reflection competes with notification. Generation Alpha stands on the edge of infinite access but must learn again the lost art of being human — of feeling without filters, of thinking without search bars, of resting without guilt. Let’s pause for a moment and explore the new lessons this decade’s children truly need to learn. Emotional and Inner Life Silence and Solitude Learning to be alone without feeling lonely. The ability to listen to one’s own thoughts — the foundat...