Ilm-Life

  End the PhD Zombie Era: Supervise, Don't Sabotage Indian universities must modernize their mentorship to retain top talent. Across labs both in India and globally, a troubling contradiction emerges. PhD students walk exhausted and creatively drained, their potential hindered by supervisors clinging to outdated mentorship models better suited for the past. Historically, long PhD timelines were justified due to laborious writing, limited access to global research, and complex data interpretation. Now, technological advances have transformed research: AI supports writing and data analysis, real-time collaboration connects researchers worldwide, and digital databases provide instant access to knowledge. Yet, some mentors, especially those influenced by older systems, resist this change, deliberately slowing progress and viewing rapid advances with suspicion. This causes delays and discourages talented scholars, often out of fear or ego, leading to a harmful cycle where mentors, onc...

Many months ago, I attended an unexpected lecture that shifted my perspective on disease, power, and the body. The speaker wasn't an oncologist or molecular biologist, but a quietly spoken English literature professor. What she said in that room made me stop taking notes and truly listen. "Cancer cells metastasise like empires," she said. The room went silent. She wasn't being poetic; she was precise. Cancer cells invade spaces that were never theirs. They rewrite the body's rules, much like colonisers rewrite a country's laws. They don't negotiate or coexist. They take, transform, and multiply until the host body becomes unrecognisable. I had spent years studying nanoformulations, drug delivery systems, and oncogenic pathways, always viewing tumours as enemies to be targeted and eradicated. But I had never heard disease described this way, not as a mere malfunction, but as an act of conquest; not something that happens to a body, but something that coloni...

It was 11 AM when I finally saw it, a crystalline image confirming something I already knew deep down. I had designed this experiment, this structure, this approach only hours earlier. Not through months of methodical literature review or linear hypothesis testing, but through something I couldn’t easily explain to anyone: intuition built from years of immersion in my field. The image matched what I had pictured before I even started. Every prediction was there. Every instinct confirmed. I should have been elated. Instead, I felt unsettled. Everything in my doctoral training insisted this wasn’t how science was supposed to work. The message had always been clear: follow the scientific method; design hypotheses systematically; review the literature exhaustively; proceed step by step. Real science, I’d been told, is not intuition or gut feeling 1 . Yet here was physical evidence contradicting the story I had been taught about how discovery should happen. That moment sparked a question th...

The true legacy of mentorship Every supervisor reaches a point, sooner or later, when they must face a simple truth: your publication list will not accompany you. Your institutional rank will not follow you. Your name on every paper, your h-index, and your office title will all cease to matter when your time comes to an end. What you will genuinely take with you is far more tangible and vital: the mark you left on the lives of those you mentored, and the kind of person you chose to be, day after day, in the presence of vulnerable young minds. Supervision is not a position of power to be exploited. It is a sacred trust. When a student approaches you, uncertain, hopeful, sometimes frightened, they are placing their intellectual and emotional safety in your hands. They are giving you the authority to build them up or pull them down. They trust you with their mental health, their confidence, and their sense of belonging in academia. And yes, they also entrust you with their physical well-b...

                             Vision and consciousness A.     The sealed hearts and blinded eyes When we observe society today, we witness a peculiar paradox: atheists are often stereotyped as individuals consumed by existential terror, yet they claim liberation from religious constraint. Believers, conversely, usually attribute this fear to the absence of divine guidance. However, this analysis fundamentally misunderstands the source of fear itself. The fear of death and the unknown does not stem from the presence or absence of belief; it originates from a deeper human condition: the lack of self-awareness and genuine consciousness. The Qur'an addresses this condition with striking clarity in Surah Al-Baqarah (2:7): [translate: خَتَمَ اللَّهُ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِهِمْ وَعَلَىٰ سَمْعِهِمْ ۖ وَعَلَىٰ أَبْصَارِهِمْ غِشَاوَةٌ ] "Allah has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing, and over...