When Visualization Turns Into Illusion Scroll through Instagram or Pinterest at the start of any new year and you’ll see it everywhere: perfectly curated vision boards. Soft beige backgrounds, luxury cars cut out from magazines, dream houses with huge windows, quotes in cursive fonts saying “This is my year” or […]
Op-ed
Anti-Intellectualism Is Bad for LU, and India
“Today’s backlash against intellectual life cannot simply be written off as a popular celebration of mindlessness,” wrote Adam Waters and E.J. Dionne Jr. in Dissent. It was true of America in 2019. It is painfully true of India now. Books written in other countries, in other decades, often feel eerily […]
Animal Farm: The Hopelessness of Being a Pawn
I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm the other day, and felt a sense of hopelessness when I finished the novella. the story is set around a farm called the ‘Manor Farm’, owned by Mr. Jones, a farmer who was once a hardworking man who took care of his animals, but […]
How we learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
They tell you, politely, that the world is what it is: messy, dangerous, and therefore to be managed by people who have seen the maps and read the books. Questioning the necessity of weapons that can erase cities, nuclear weapons, the all-consuming instruments of modern statecraft, will earn you a […]
The Philosophy of Main Character Energy
Call it delusion, call it digital-age dharma, but everyone’s living like the book deal is already in motion. “Main character energy” has emerged as both a meme and a mantra: the idea that one should live as though the camera is following, the soundtrack is swelling, and the universe is […]
Nice Girls don’t get the Corner Offices
The corporate world loves a woman who knows her place. She’s polite in meetings, punctual in email threads, and carries just the right amount of ambition to be seen as productive, but not enough to be seen as a threat. She smiles through interruptions, thanks people for stealing her ideas, […]
Are Men Too Emotional to Be in Positions of Leadership?
It is a question that, on the surface, reads like satire. But then you remember the tantrums. The unfiltered tweets at 3 a.m. The sulking after parliamentary debates. The blood-boiling monologues in war rooms. You recall the finger-pointing press conferences, the volcanic bursts of ego on global stages, the treaties […]
THE POP-PSYCHOLOGY CULTURE
Once upon a time, understanding the mind meant stepping into battle – not with capes or superpowers, but with the monsters inside us. Freud, armed with his theories of the unconscious – forever searching for the mother of all answers (yes your mother).Jung with his archetypes asking us to see […]
You Can’t Self-Care Your Way Out of Late-Stage Capitalism
I lit a candle that smells like neoliberalism, poured myself a mug of herbal delusion, and tried deep breathing through the existential dread of unpaid internships and overpriced therapy. They told me self-care would save me. Turns out, all it saved was capitalism’s conscience. This is your gentle reminder – […]
Why wearing lip gloss doesn’t mean I can’t still be your boss
From the moment a girl picks up lip gloss in one hand and a book in the other, the world starts glitching. Society loves its binaries – you can be pretty or smart, stylish or serious, soft or revolutionary. Apparently, if your eyeliner is sharp, your intellect can’t be. There’s […]