I still remember the first time I stood outside the University gate, just after the first COVID lockdown had lifted. I had just begun my PhD, and I had no real sense of where it would take me. But I was certain about one thing. I wanted to study outrage. It was because of how the toxicity of Twitter and TikTok discourse personally affected me.

I wanted to dig deeper and see how outrage shows up, how it spreads, and how it shapes conversations on social media. The intial days were exciting - reading amazing literature by the likes of Molly Crockett and realising that India was lacking any research in this area, especially at that scale and depth. I was pulled in immediately. But the journey has been a mix of some highs and many lows.

Sharing a glimpse from my last presentation from February this year. It feels strange to say this, but for the first time, it really feels like this PhD will come to an end. I’m hoping to submit my thesis this year.

These days, most of my time is spent sitting in front of my laptop, writing and rewriting, trying to bring five years of work together. More than a thousand videos collected. A hundred of them analyzed closely. Over 7,000 comments read, coded, and revisited. I am trying to turn all of this into something that feels coherent, something that holds.

What these numbers don’t show are the long stretches of doubt. The days when it felt like this would never come together. The constant feeling of not doing enough, or not being enough. Doing all of this alongside a full-time job, while life kept moving in its own way.

And even now, that voice hasn’t really gone away. It still shows up and asks if this is good enough, if others would have done this better. Maybe, they would have.

But there is something else now too. A quieter voice that wasn’t always there. It reminds me that showing up every day counts. That staying with something this long means something. I don’t think the feeling is pride in a big, obvious way. It is softer than that. A kind of quiet acknowledgment that I stayed with it, even when I wasn’t sure I could.

When I finally submit, I think I’ll have more to say about what this journey really was. For now, I’m still in it. Still writing, still figuring things out. This beautiful couplet by Nida Fazli sa'ab is playing on loop in my head these days:

“किन राहों से सफ़र है आसाँ, कौन सा रस्ता मुश्किल है, हम भी जब थक कर बैठेंगे, औरों को समझाएँगे।”