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

Are doctoral committees becoming the villains of academia? Or are they the last guardians of academic integrity? In an age of objective exams, publication metrics, AI shortcuts, and the race to increase PhD numbers, something fundamental is at stake: the meaning of research itself. When doctoral committees question weak synopses, poor language skills, absence of literature review, or lack of hypothesis, are they gatekeeping — or safeguarding scholarship? This piece reflects on the changing culture of PhD admissions in the post-pandemic era, the neoliberal quantification of knowledge, and why difficult academic conversations still matter. Because a PhD is not a number. It is an intellectual responsibility. Read on. Doctoral Committees Are Not Villains. They Are the Last Gatekeepers of Academic Integrity. Every year, doctoral committees across universities undertake what appears to be a routine academic exercise: screening applicants for PhD programmes. Candidates submit synopses, a...

A protest can be fierce without being filthy. If dissent turns into degradation, the university has failed its own purpose. What is happening to our campuses? Universities were meant to be difficult spaces — spaces of argument, disagreement, intellectual friction. They were not meant to be polite echo chambers. But neither were they meant to be theatres of abuse. Across India, academic spaces are sliding into a dangerous habit: confusing volume with conviction and insult with resistance. Yes, violence from any political camp is condemnable. That is obvious. But something subtler and more corrosive is taking root — the normalization of verbal violence. Language is being flung like debris, and we are beginning to treat it as harmless fallout. It is not harmless. Words shape political culture. Words teach habits of thought. Words train citizens. When those in power deploy contemptuous language, it is an abuse of authority. But when students mirror that same vocabulary — when dissent tur...

What happens when the language of social media quietly slips into our homes? When presence needs alerts, and affection needs notification? A small moment with my daughter turned into a meditation on vocabulary in the digital age. Today, my daughter asked me — casually, while both of us were perfectly, physically at home — Amma, why didn’t you send me  a notification about the grapes you bought and kept in the kitchen? Notification. The word rolled across the room like a misplaced emoji. I laughed — but somewhere inside, a small seed split open. Since when did fruit require an alert? Since when did love need a pop-up reminder? Once upon a time, we called out from the other room. Now even presence waits for a ping. Vocabulary has shifted its furniture. Offline life now borrows the grammar of screens. When you find new friends — you add them. When someone exhausts you — you delete them. Memories are archived. Affection is scheduled. Silence becomes “seen.” A friend rushing past no l...

The world loves finished products. But life was never meant to be factory-made. You are not here to fit a mould — you are here to create one. Don’t let the world dry you out. Stay soft. Stay experimental. Stay unfinished. Because shapelessness is not weakness — it’s possibility. Life is not a script. It is clay. Soft. Uncertain. Waiting. And you — you are the sculptor. Whatever the world may whisper about symmetry, about success, about the “right” shape of a life — remember: it is your hands that press into the yielding earth, your fingers that leave their quiet imprints. Do not look up to borrowed blueprints or prefabricated dreams. The world loves templates. It fears the unfinished. Look instead at artists, at writers — how they carve their own grammar, how they bend rules until rules begin to breathe. Their forms are never fixed. They are always becoming. The clay waits for you. For your pulse. For the heat of your imagination to move through its damp uncerta...