An Annual Update + Plans (sort of)

I have wanted to updated this space for a while without coming to terms in terms of what this kind of thing means anymore. The more social media saturates spaces, the more it becomes difficult to create without either catering to the kind of writing and “content creation” that would gather more eyeballs or creating a kind of echo chamber that is akin to the academic work that I find myself doing anyway. This is why a website, like a private website of someone who is working in the humanities is a strange private-public interface. The goal, I hope, is to be able to document things (research, random bits of writing, workshopping bits of writing in public) rather than create some kind of content machine that is regular and geared towards more clickbait.

And since the last update on this site was more than a year ago, here are some of the more important life updates that need documenting:

So what did I do?

I published some academic work. This was a co-edited issue with my colleague Florian Schybilski at Kairos. The link to that issue can be found here.

I wrote some poetry that got published in the wonderful Bombay Lit Mag.

I defended my dissertation! This seems like a small thing since I had already handed in my work in September. But I think there is a space where our minds completely hand over stress to the future. And that stress just sits in wait of a moment to come in. As it did for me last week, when I defended my thesis in a small room in Uni Potsdam. I will be looking at publishing now that I have my work in place. And this is one of the things that I want to reflect upon (read: force myself to work on): to actually read my dissertation and document the way I am reading this five years after writing the first chapter.

I moved! Moving in a place like Berlin is a kind of miracle that one hopes to witness, either for one’s own self or for their friends. To find an apartment in one’s old neighbourhood is even stranger. I am learning about the new places in my old ‘hood.

Reading more books! Quite a few people who go into academia, especially in literature, end up never reading for pleasure again. Maybe it is because people are busy in a hundred different projects with the pressure to publish or perish. Soon enough we end up in a situation where there is absolutely no space for people to be able to enjoy the act of reading that brought them into the academic line of reading in the first place. I want to document the books that I am reading right now and want to do it in a long form manner that is not encumbered by character limits.

So that is that for now. The end of May 2024, starting things over.