Admission Confirmed, Survival Pending: The Hidden Cost of Studying at Delhi University By Shruti Jha | October 2026 | Campus & Education Investigation Getting past the cut-offs is only half the battle; surviving Delhi’s unregulated student housing market is the real test. Expensive, exploitative and exorbitant. These are definitely three perfect adjectives to describe the conditions that students experience within the University of Delhi. Across North and South Campus, fewer than 8,000 official hostel beds exist for hundreds of thousands of students—forcing outstation teenagers into an unregulated private rental maze where safety and affordability areroutinely compromised. While it is often said that as soon as you leave your house you are on your own, to an extent it is true. How can we be sure that we will be safe and sound? How can we be sure that the PG in which we are living won’t turn into rubble next minute ? There is ...
Digging through the digital crates: Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Musical Memory. The Ultimate Musical Blind Date: When I Challenged the AI Giants to Find Songs I Haven't Heard Have you ever felt completely suffocated by the modern recommendation algorithm? It was late on a Sunday evening. I had just closed a long editorial review cycle at Sahityashala , exhausted by screens, analytics, and deadlines. I put on my studio headphones, opened YouTube, and looked for something raw—something emotionally staggering from the golden eras of Indian music. Instead, the feed served me the exact same twenty songs it has pushed for the last four years. Lag Ja Gale. Pehla Nasha. Chaiyya Chaiyya. Kabhi Kabhie Mere Dil Mein. Streaming algorithms do not optimize for discovery; they optimize for consensus. They take zero risks. But as a poet who wrote Tum Mera Pehla Prayas Ho , I don't listen to music for comfortable background noise. I listen...