Ever wondered why theory feels intimidating—or irrelevant? This blog is my attempt to show how critical theories quietly shape the way we understand everyday things like taste, politics, and meaning—and why learning to think critically is still one of the most radical skills we can cultivate.
Why Critical Theories Still Matter?
This blog emerges as a response to a question that circulates with increasing urgency in academic spaces today—among both teachers and students: why should we engage with critical theories at all? What sense does it make to teach thinkers like Derrida or Foucault in the twenty-first century, when their most visible intellectual negotiations were with the political, philosophical, and epistemic crises of the twentieth? Add to this the often intimidating density of theoretical writing—especially for those with limited exposure to philosophical prose—and we arrive at a curious paradox: a body of thought designed to unsettle dogma and sharpen perception is experienced instead as inaccessible, abstract, and alienating. This toxic combination deprives students of the rich, transformative flavours that critical theories can bring to how they see the world.
Yet critical theory does not begin in rarefied texts; it begins in everyday acts of meaning-making. Take something as ordinary as the sentence: “This dish is so sweet.” Both speaker and listener assume a perfect transfer of meaning, as though “sweet” were a stable, transparent category. But this apparent simplicity is achieved through a quiet violence: the infinite possibilities of sweetness are collapsed into a single, dominant denomination that suits the speaker’s sensory and cultural sensibilities. How, then, do we account for different kinds of sweetness—the sweetness of sugar, mango, jaggery? Even within sugar-based sweets, is the sweetness of laddoo, payasam, and Mysore pak truly the same? And what happens to the concept of sweetness for a diabetic person whose palate has been trained by restriction and caution? These erasures and elisions often go unnoticed—but they become immediately visible to someone trained in critical sensibility.
Critical theory teaches us to notice what disappears when meaning appears natural.
The same logic operates in our political vocabulary. We routinely categorise political systems as “left” or “right” without pausing to ask: what assumptions, affects, and histories are embedded in these terms? Is there an abstract “leftness” or “rightness” that exists beyond concrete policies and decisions? Can authoritarian practices be understood as inherently “right-wing” even when they emerge from political formations conventionally labelled as “left”? Conversely, can citizen-sensitive welfare measures introduced by governments branded as “right-wing” be read as traces of left imaginaries? Critical theory compels us to examine these inherited binaries—not to dissolve them into relativism, but to understand how power, ideology, and habit shape our thinking beneath the level of conscious choice.
What does it mean, then, to critically engage with everyday life beyond cliché, branding, and inherited labels? Why should critical theories function as a bridge between academia and the wider world? How—and why—must theories be reimagined so that they live beyond classrooms, syllabi, and examinations? Irrespective of how often we debate the (ir)relevance of the humanities today, one question remains unavoidable: as long as human lives exist, how can theory not be relevant? What do theories enable us to see, name, and question that stories or poems—powerful as they are—might not always accomplish in the same way?
This blog page is an attempt to explore these questions—not by simplifying theory into slogans, but by returning theory to its ethical and intellectual vocation: to make thinking more careful, perception more alert, and certainty more provisional. Drawing from my own experiences as both teacher and student of critical theory, I invite you into a space where theory is not an obstacle to understanding, but a rhythm that sharpens thought, deepens curiosity, and expands the possibilities of how we inhabit the world.
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