Siddhiba Gohil

This blog post is a part of my flipped learning activity designed to deepen my understanding of Existentialism through self-directed exploration and critical reflection. 1. Reflections on Key Thoughts While engaging with the video resources, several profound ideas stood out to me. Here are the thoughts that resonated most from each session: Video 1: Existentialism 1 (Introduction) Selected Thought: “Existence precedes essence.” Reflection: This core tenet struck me the most—the idea that we are born as "nothing" and must define ourselves through our actions and choices throughout our lives. There is no pre-written script or inherent "purpose" given to us at birth; we are the authors of our own identity. Video 2: Flipped Learning Task - Instructions Selected Thought: “The transition from being a passive listener to an active connector of dots.” Reflection: This instruction highlighted that learning about philosophy isn't just about memorizing definitions but abou...

Adapting a beloved literary classic for the screen is a perilous task. Few novels are as enshrined in the cultural imagination as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a masterpiece of prose and a piercing critique of the American Dream. When director Baz Luhrmann took on the challenge with his 2013 film, the result was a famously bold, visually spectacular, and deeply divisive adaptation. Luhrmann did not simply translate the novel; he transformed it, making audacious changes that forced audiences to see the familiar story in an entirely new light. What happens when a story defined by its subtle, melancholic prose is reimagined as a frenetic, 3D spectacle? Here are five of the most surprising and impactful changes Luhrmann made to bring Gatsby to the modern screen. 1. The Narrator Became a Patient: Nick Carraway's Sanitarium The film's most significant and inventive structural change is its framing device: placing Nick Carraway not as a simple memoirist, but as a patient...

I ntroduction: Unlocking a Famously Difficult Poem For a century, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land has stood as a cornerstone of modernist poetry—a famously challenging monument to the disillusionment and fragmentation of the post-war Western world. Its fractured voices, obscure allusions, and bleak landscapes are often seen as the ultimate expression of a civilization in decay. Yet, a key to unlocking the poem's intricate structure, and its ultimate hope for renewal, lies in a surprising direction: not in the ruins of Europe, but in the ancient wisdom of India. The philosophical traditions of the Upanishads, the Vedas, and early Buddhist texts provide more than just exotic flavor to Eliot's masterpiece. They form a foundational framework that helps diagnose the spiritual sickness of modernity and offers a clear path toward salvation. This article will explore four of the most impactful ways this Eastern intellectual heritage shapes the poem, transforming it from a purely Wester...

Introduction: The release of Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound has done more than just sweep international awards; it has reopened a wound in the Indian collective consciousness that many were eager to let scar over. Adapted from Basharat Peer’s poignant New York Times essay, "A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway," the film is a brutal, 128-minute interrogation of what it means to belong to a nation that, in its moment of crisis, treated millions of its own citizens as "ghosts" in the machinery. This comprehensive analysis explores the film through three lenses: the reality of the 2020 migration, the cinematic subversion of the "Uniform," and the ethical fallout that continues to haunt the production. I. The Reality: From Devari to the Silver Screen To understand Homebound , we must first step out of the theater and onto the asphalt of National Highway 3 in May 2020. The film finds its heartbeat in the real-life tragedy of Amrit Kumar and Moh...

Introduction: The Ghost in the Stanzas : History is often written in the blood of battlefields, but it is felt in the quiet, feverish breaths of the sickroom. For a century, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land has been enshrined as the definitive anthem of post-World War I disillusionment—a landscape of broken columns and shell-shocked souls. We have been taught to see the trenches in its shadows and the collapse of empires in its fragments. However, as we emerge from our own global struggle with COVID-19, the poem begins to shimmer with a different, more haunting light. What if the "Waste Land" wasn't just a metaphor for a broken civilization, but a literal description of a world ravaged by the 1918 Spanish Flu? By re-examining Eliot’s masterpiece through a "viral lens," we discover that the poem is not merely about the trauma of war, but about the terrifying, delirious, and often silent trauma of a pandemic. Our collective experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has fun...