The Unabridged Version of a Rational Emotional Mind

It was a chilly afternoon. We were sitting in class, waiting for our professor to show up. It was one of the few classes in which our brains were really worked up over seemingly fundamental truths and questions to be answered.  One such question we were asked that day was this - Who are you? A simple question at the surface, but something too profound to grapple with. I remember that day, nineteen-year-old me wrote ten long sentences describing my ethnicity, religious affinity, birth order, abilities, talents, various social groups I belonged to, and the roles and titles I held as a person.  Now, twenty-six year old me wonders - if I strip away my social identity and the roles I play, who am I then? Here's what I think -  I am a dreamer. Someone who cooks up stories through her writing, rewrites her past in her brain, and runs the trains of mindless thoughts into her unpredictable future. I love entering into the worlds created by others through their art - be it books, m...

It’s been nearly two years since I started my PhD program, and I have spent most of my time reading the works of those who came before me. I fairly enjoy reading difficult texts. I’ve been the kind of person who, as a child, would read a dictionary for fun, carry it along to decode complex verses in unabridged versions of Shakespearean plays and 18th-century novels. But somehow, despite all that training, I still find academic papers to be the toughest lot I have ever tackled. Having spent one year navigating through corporate jargon at work, I really thought academia would be different. Silly me! At first, I believed it was my lack of conceptual clarity that caused these problems around comprehension. But as time went by, I realised, sometimes it’s really not the reader’s fault! First, I had to figure out how to get through pesky publisher paywalls. Then I realised, it is better to take an open-access publishing as the positionality for my work than struggle senselessly with c...