Dr. Kishore Paknikar

A growing concern is being felt in classrooms and faculty rooms. If students can access lectures from the best universities, solve problems using artificial intelligence, and get explanations within seconds, what is left for the teacher to do? Has the role of the teacher reached its limit? The concern is understandable, but it rests on a weak assumption. Information has become abundant. Understanding has not, and thinking, certainly not. For a long time, teachers were the main source of...

As academic incentives harden into predictable pathways, science risks trading curiosity for predictable outcomes. A recent article in  Nature  magazine describes an unusual online game from China in which players step into the life of a young faculty member. They must publish papers, secure research grants, manage teaching, and navigate institutional pressures. What is striking is not the game's premise but how real it feels to those who play it. This reaction is worth pausing to consider....

Open a research paper today and you may feel you are decoding a message rather than reading a sentence. A single paragraph can appear as a string of capital letters, each representing something important, yet together making the text harder to follow. What begins as simplification often ends in confusion. We encounter such abbreviations not only in scientific writing but also in news reports, government policies, corporate communication, and everyday conversations. Acronyms, originally meant...