My PhD Journey Diary

  Camilla Lackberg is the best selling Swedish author specialising in crime fiction. Her books are in sequence and the characters develop over the years and over her books. Not all her books are available in English and even less in India at present, but hopefully that will change! How is this series different from most other Scandinavian crime writing? Say for eg, Stieg Larsson? Lackberg uses domestic settings for her crimes, friends and neighbours, local police, local detectives, the snoopy neighbour who provides clues. Even when she goes beyond the immediately domestic, say, in :The Hidden Child" where she deals with the Nazi threat on Sweden in the 1930-s and 40-s, it is still rooted in the characters surrounding the locality. The books available in India (amazon.in) are- The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stone Cutter, The Stranger, The Hidden Child, The Girl in The Woods.  The protagonist is Erica Falck, a writer by profession, who moves to her native Fjallbac...

In our classroom lecture by a visiting professor from one of India's top institutes, I came to know this- It is better if one becomes an Assistant Professor by the time they hit 40. After that, and I paraphrase- It becomes very difficult, very very difficult... I hit the big four oh! the year I decided to call it quits on a dead end job which was offering me neither enough money nor enough challenges, and try to fulfil my childhood dream of being called DR. And of course that also meant, that at this age I was ready for a do-over. Get into academics, see if I could make a future here. I gave myself one year to get admission into a prestigious course, drew up a list of universities/ institutions I would try, and shot off my first email to TISS which had just opened its admission process.  I first realised that I was getting into something where I could be a misfit, at the final admission interview in TISS. Before that the admission procedure consisted of sending in a proposal, and a...

I am part of TISS's 2018 combined 5 year M-Phil-PhD batch. Which means effectively that in 2020 I have finished my MPhil, and my PhD should get over by 2023. And it is 2022. And I do not have a topic yet. Month after month, week after week this has been my to-do point number 1. Freeze on the topic. And I am still where I was 6 months back. Still thinking.  MPhil got over in March 2020 and the viva got over instead of April, much later that year. So it was expected of our batch that in 2021 we should have published at least one paper from our MPhil dissertation and settled more or less on the topic for the PhD.  Some have. Most of them I see working on the same topics, a logical up-step from their M Phil theses. That makes complete sense. Your literature is more or less ready. You just need to figure out where to go as the next step and start the research. I wished to do so too. But boredom had set in. I could not think of anything I wanted to do in employee voice any more. I w...