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

Some follow inherited recipes. Some experiment. Some burn and begin again. Life, like cooking, belongs to the daring. Life Is Not a Fixed Recipe Every life is a dish in the making. We are handed a kitchen not of our choosing - a geography, a family, a language, a body, a history simmering long before we arrive. These are our first ingredients. Some are fresh and abundant. Some are scarce. Some are already bruised by time. Not everyone has access to saffron and almonds. Not everyone begins with fragrant spices. Privilege, like premium produce, is unevenly distributed. But ingredients alone do not decide the meal. The chef matters. Life is shaped not only by what we inherit but by what we select. Add cloves, cinnamon, bay leaves, the dish grows aromatic. Add patience, curiosity, tenderness, the life grows textured. Garnish with laughter, resilience, wonder and suddenly the ordinary becomes luminous. Yet even the finest ingredients, left unattended, can spoil. And even modest ingredients,...

Yesterday’s newspaper offered a fascinating lesson in political narratology. What looked like news slowly unfolded as a carefully structured story - crisis in the past, redemption in the present. In the age of neoliberal communication, elections are no longer just campaigns; they are narratives crafted like advertisements. When politics begins to speak the language of branding, what happens to democracy? Political Narratology: When Politics Learns to Tell Stories Like Advertisements Elections have always been moments of heightened political imagination. Parties mobilize symbols, slogans, and promises to persuade voters. But in recent decades something subtle yet profound has changed. Elections are no longer merely arenas of political campaigning; they have become laboratories of political storytelling. Until the late twentieth century, professional political advertising had not yet become an established feature of India’s electoral landscape. Politics had campaigns, not advertisements....

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...