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

Before we called it love, before we named it anger, it was only a tremor in the chest — wild, wordless, alive. This poem is about what happens when language touches emotion — and what it quietly takes away. Emotions— deep, fresh, and tender like green shoots breaking through rain-soaked soil— arrive without grammar. They rise quietly, carrying the scent of earth, the tremble of first light, the fragile insistence of becoming. But language waits. It waits with its sharp tools— definitions, categories, conclusions. It gathers these wild stirrings into its boiling cauldrons, heats them, thickens them, pours them into shapes the world knows how to store. “Love.” “Anger.” “Jealousy.” “Desire.” Neat words. Solid containers. And something raw begins to disappear. The tremor before love becomes a declaration. The ache before grief becomes a statement. The unnamed hunger before desire becomes confession. Language smoothens the rough edges, trims the unruly corners, ...

Before emojis, words had shadows. They hesitated, lingered, trembled. This piece is a small elegy for the meanings we lost in the glow of perfect reactions. In a world crowded with language yet strangely emptied of listening, we scatter smileys— small yellow suns pressed onto the sky of every sentence. They glow. They perform. They promise clarity. And in their polished brightness something softer begins to disappear. Between two curved lines of a grin whole forests fall silent— the tremor in a voice, the ache hidden in a pause, the fragile hesitation before saying I miss you . Smileys do not tremble. They do not falter. They never carry the weight of a word that almost breaks while leaving the mouth. Once, meaning moved like a gentle breeze— slipping between syllables, resting in commas, lingering in the hush after a full stop. Desire drifted like the fragrance of wild roses— unannounced, uncontained, waiting for someone patient enough to lean closer. ...

“It is women who usually lead men astray.” A harmless joke? Or a deeply rooted cultural script? Why is it that men who are raised to be decisive and powerful suddenly become helpless victims after marriage? This piece explores the strange disappearance of male agency—and the convenient resurrection of the ‘cunning wife’ trope in our social imagination. Let’s talk about accountability, patriarchy, and the politics hidden in everyday language. “It Is Women Who Usually Lead Men Astray” — A Familiar Script in a New Voice I stumbled upon the sentence while casually flipping through Malayalam television channels: “It is women who usually lead men astray.” The speaker was no fringe commentator. He was a well-known, well-educated public official—widely respected, articulate, and socially influential. He sat there beside his wife, smiling, explaining that he was fortunate to have a partner who shared his values and supported his life choices. On the surface, it sounded harmless. Perhaps even a...

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. ...