A reel by a club at Ashoka may just be a few seconds of stimulation in the course of a doom scroll, but the aphorism ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’ holds for a reason—a video, then? Arguably, even more. The seemingly insignificant reel becomes important to us all, for this bite of information plays a vital role in how our institution is perceived. The number of times a friend from another university has sent me a reel from HerCampus or CLAD is, well, countless.

On May 21st, author Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, a collection of twelve short stories, originally written in Kannada and later translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, won the coveted International Booker Prize, becoming the first ever Kannada book to do so. It came as a rebuke to India’s literary establishment.

Displacement, migration, or even just the act of moving out, was never simply about crossing borders or the unsettling of the familiar that follows, but also the shifting and suppression of desires.