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

We think we know a system—until the day we step inside it. I walked into the Centre for Undergraduate Studies with assumptions, half-truths, and campus gossip. A month later, those assumptions have been shaken, re-shaped, and in some cases, turned upside down. This is the story of how a bell, a Director, and a demanding system taught me more about discipline, empathy, and leadership than any theory ever could. There’s a saying we all know too well: It is easy to criticise a system—until you become part of it. One month ago, that was me. And one month ago, that was exactly how I looked at Prof. Sam Solomon and the Centre for Undergraduate Studies (CUS). Like many others, I had my assumptions, my grievances, and—let me be brutally honest—my prejudices. I had often heard that Sam Sir was a “difficult person,” “strict,” “unapproachable”—the kind of senior you politely avoid in corridors. I had hardly ever interacted with him myself, but the campus grapevine had already written the script f...

In 2008, at a time when ‘Kerala Modernity’ had become a kind of sacred slogan — invoked in policy reports, academic seminars, and everyday political debates — Prof. Jayasree offered a gentle but powerful disruption. She called it ‘Many Modernities.’ It wasn’t just the title of an international colloquium she organized at the University of Kerala. It was an epistemic intervention — a challenge to the self-congratulatory narratives of progress that often passed as truth. For decades, ‘Kerala Modernity’ had been spoken of with pride, as a mirror reflecting reason, reform, literacy, and social equality. But mirrors can also blind us. Behind the gleam of this success story, other realities — those of caste, class, gender, and faith — had quietly slipped out of sight. Prof. Jayasree’s idea cracked that mirror. She invited us to look again — not at a modernity, not at 'multiple modernities' but at ‘many modernities’; not at one Kerala, but at many Keralas. And that, perhaps, is where...

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...