‘When Physics overwhelmed me, I turned to novels: That led me to an IIT’ | Life in an IIT

There were evenings during Class 12 when Physics would beat me. I would put the textbook down, pick up whatever novel I was reading at the time, and spend an hour somewhere else entirely. Reading had been a habit for as long as I could remember, but during those evenings it started to feel like something more than a habit. It felt like the thing that actually made sense to me.

I am 23, from Theni in Tamil Nadu, and I am currently a second-year PhD scholar in the Liberal Arts Department at IIT Hyderabad, where I research Linguistics. The road that got me here runs through Arakkonam, Port Blair, Secunderabad, Mumbai, Tiruchirappalli, and a subject that most would not expect to find at an IIT.

My father is a defense civilian who works with the Indian Navy. The life that came with that job meant my schooling moved with him. I studied at Kendriya Vidyalaya schools in four different places across the country. Growing up like that, arriving in a new city, building a new circle, learning a new version of normal, taught me things that no single classroom could have. It also meant that adapting to new environments became something I did without thinking about it.

For Class 11 and 12, I was in the Computer Science stream: maths, physics, chemistry, English. My parents had always hoped I would study at a prominent technical institution, and I had imagined something similar for myself. But physics kept presenting itself as a wall, and on those evenings I kept reaching for novels instead. At some point, I started asking a question I had not asked before: what if the thing I was drawn to, language, reading, the way a sentence could shift your understanding of the world, was worth taking seriously as a field?

Why I chose English over STEM courses

After Class 12, I took a decision that surprised everyone. I chose to pursue a BA in English. That led to a Masters in English at NIT Tiruchirappalli, my parents had hoped for a technical institution, and NIT Trichy happened to offer an MA in English that had a curriculum I found compelling. Our batch was small, just 17 students, and the coursework was intensive. It was there that I encountered Biolinguistics, the study of the biological and cognitive foundations of how humans acquire and use language. That subject changed the direction of everything that came after. I wrote my Masters dissertation on a related topic, and by the time I finished, I knew what I wanted to pursue.

I appeared for the UGC NET exam for assistant professorship and cleared it in my first attempt. I then prepared for the Junior Research Fellowship examination, a harder bar, and cleared that too. When I began looking for PhD programmes, I applied to only one institution: IIT Hyderabad. Not as a backup, as a considered first and only choice. The research environment in the humanities department, and the presence of a programme at the intersection of language and cognitive science, was exactly what I was looking for.

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The admission process at IITH involved a shortlisting, a research proposal and an online interview. Writing the proposal was genuinely hard; I did not feel prepared, and there were moments when I considered waiting for the next cycle. I reached out to seniors, to research scholars at NIT Trichy, to anyone who had navigated something similar. I built a proposal around the papers I had read during my Masters dissertation. I submitted it, and got through.

I joined IITH in July 2025. The campus is open in a way I value. There is a physical freedom to the place I had not experienced before. I work at the Language and Cognition Lab in the Liberal Arts Department, usually arriving around 8:30 in the morning. My research is theoretical: I look at the relationship between the order in which words appear in a sentence and how those words are internally connected to each other. That relationship is shaped by cognitive constraints, by how the brain organises and processes language in real time. It is an attempt to explain something that every human does without thinking about it: the instant, effortless production and understanding of complex sentences.

Linguistics doesn’t mean knowing multiple languages

When I describe my research at IITH, the first question I often get from students in engineering departments is: how many languages do you speak? It is an understandable confusion. Most people hear “linguistics” and assume it means knowing many languages. It does not. Linguistics is the study of how language works as a system, it has subfields that deal with sounds, meaning, use in context, and increasingly the computational and neural dimensions of language. The questions I am working on sit at the border of syntax and cognitive science. A laptop, internet access, academic journals and a notebook are my primary tools; the lab is named for cognition, not chemistry.

I head the Visit IITH club on campus, which organises guided tours for school students and prospective visitors. Something happens at the end of each tour, the enthusiasm on the faces of students who have never been inside a campus like this, that I find quietly satisfying. The research gives me one kind of purpose. The tours give me another, and the two do not feel like they are competing.

Life outside the labs

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Apart from academics, I crochet, cycle and walk. I cycled around 50 kilometres within the campus on Independence Day. On evenings when work allows, some of us walk towards the water reservoir near the convention centre and watch the sunset, the light on the water at that hour is unlike anything I have seen at the other places I have lived.

PhD work, I have learned, is fundamentally an exercise in sitting with uncertainty. A research direction that looks promising today may need to be abandoned later. Employment after the degree is not guaranteed. The timeline is long, and during those years your peers are shifting jobs and advancing on other timelines. I have found that the only useful response is to accept uncertainty as a condition of the work, not a problem to solve before you can begin.

I studied maths, physics and computer science in Class 12 fully expecting to end up in STEM. I turned to novels when physics got hard, chose English when I could have chosen otherwise, qualified for a fellowship when I was not sure I would, and applied to one PhD programme with no plan B. Every one of those decisions felt uncertain at the time. I cannot say now which of them was the decisive one.