Academic Writing Workshop 2026

 Hello everyone this blog is a part of documentation and my learning experience of Academic Writing Workshop. 

The Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU) successfully organized a week-long National Workshop on Academic Writing under the aegis of the Promotion of Higher Education Knowledge Consortium (KCG), Government of Gujarat. Spanning six intellectually intensive days, the workshop brought together university authorities, distinguished scholars, teachers, research scholars, and students in a vibrant academic environment dedicated to strengthening writing skills, research ethics, and responsible AI integration.

Inaugural Ceremony: 27 January, 2026

The workshop commenced with a dignified inaugural ceremony anchored by Ms. Prakruti Bhatt. The programme began with a formal welcome, followed by the University Song and Prayer.

As a symbolic gesture honouring knowledge and scholarship, the dignitaries were welcomed with ceremonial book presentations.

The distinguished guests included:

• Hon’ble Vice-Chancellor Prof. (Dr.) B. B. Ramanuj

• In-Charge Registrar Dr. Bhavesh Jani

• Dean, Faculty of Arts Dr. Kishor Joshi

• Resource Persons Prof. (Dr.) Paresh Joshi and Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay

Prof. (Dr.) Dilip Barad, Head of the Department of English and Workshop Convenor, delivered the welcome address. He outlined the objectives of the workshop, emphasizing a contemporary academic challenge: balancing Natural Intelligence (NI) with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The workshop was structured around academic writing skills, ethical AI usage, NET/JRF guidance, research aptitude, and the development of a Digital Resource Hub.

The inaugural plenary sessions established the intellectual foundation of the workshop. Prof. (Dr.) Paresh Joshi reflected on the evolution of writing across historical phases and stressed the need to preserve human creativity and critical thinking in the age of generative AI. Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay traced the tradition of academic writing in India from ancient knowledge systems to frameworks such as NEP 2020 and NCF 2023, emphasizing multilingualism and rooted scholarship.

Day 1 (27 January 2026):

Academic Writing and Prompt Engineering

The first technical session, led by Prof. (Dr.) Paresh Joshi from Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, focused on Academic Writing and Prompt Engineering.

He distinguished clearly between creative writing and academic writing, describing academic writing as the “literature of knowledge” — objective, logical, and evidence-based. He presented writing as a scholarly conversation: one listens through literature review, reports existing ideas, responds analytically, and contributes original insight.

Key principles discussed included:

• Formal tone

• Clarity and precision

• Logical flow

• Strong thesis statements

• Responsible claim-making

The second half introduced Prompt Engineering—crafting precise instructions for AI tools. Techniques such as zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought, and role-based prompting were demonstrated. Importantly, he emphasized ethical AI use, warning against overdependence and encouraging fact-checking and originality.

Day One & Two: (27,28 January,2026):

Advanced Academic Writing

 

Dr. Kalyan Chattopadhyay conducted two intensive sessions on Academic Writing for Advanced Learners. These sessions examined writing as both a formal and rhetorical practice.

Core features of academic writing—formality, objectivity, clarity, and precision—were explored in depth. Participants were trained to:

• Frame research questions effectively

• Distinguish findings from interpretation

• Use disciplined citation practices

• Apply hedging strategies appropriately

• Develop coherent literature reviews

Drawing on Ken Hyland’s framework of authorial identity, Dr. Chattopadhyay explained that academic writing is not entirely impersonal; rather, scholars must strategically manage visibility. The nuanced discussion of first-person usage, hedging devices, and rhetorical positioning significantly strengthened participants’ understanding of scholarly voice.

Day Two & Three (28,29 January 2026):

Publishing in Indexed Journals and BAWE Corpus

Dr. Clement Ndoricimpa from Burundi, East Africa conducted online sessions on publishing in Scopus and Web of Science indexed journals.

He explained the importance of indexed journals for visibility, citation impact, and career advancement. The IMRD structure (Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion) was elaborated, with particular attention to crafting a strong introduction through the three-move model:

1. Establishing research territory

2. Identifying the research gap

3. Occupying the niche

A recurring emphasis was placed on references and credibility. Unsupported claims were identified as a major weakness in research writing.

The sessions also addressed:

• Academic vocabulary and coherence

• Ethical AI usage

• Plagiarism and integrity

• Reference management using Mendeley

• Citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, Vancouver)

These sessions blended technical training with ethical awareness, reinforcing that academic publishing demands intellectual honesty and methodological rigour.

Day Three (29 January, 2026):

Detecting AI Hallucination

Prof. (Dr.) Nigam Dave from Pandit Deendayal Energy University delivered a thought-provoking lecture on AI Hallucination and Academic Integrity.

He defined AI hallucination as the production of statistically plausible but factually fabricated information. Scholars were warned against blindly trusting AI-generated citations, vague phrases, or invented references.

He highlighted warning signs such as:

• Unverified claims (“studies show…”)

• Fabricated citations

• Confident but unverifiable prose

Importantly, he did not reject AI outright. Instead, he advocated for ethical and strategic use—AI as assistant, not author. Human oversight, critical verification, and scholarly judgment were presented as non-negotiable responsibilities.

Day Four & Five (30,31 January, 2026):

From Classroom to Academic Career

 

Dr. Kalyani Vallath conducted transformative sessions integrating academic writing, NET preparation, literary history, and career orientation.

She emphasized growth mindset, disciplined practice, and strategic planning. Writing was described as a skill cultivated through revision and reflection. Practical techniques such as free writing, reverse planning, and mind mapping were introduced.

Her sessions on UGC NET preparation demystified the exam, showing that it tests reasoning and conceptual clarity rather than rote memory. Literary history and theory—from classical criticism to Structuralism, Feminism, and Postcolonialism—were presented in an integrated conceptual framework.

The sessions extended beyond examination strategies to long-term academic identity building and self-belief.

Day Six (01 February,2026):

Multimodal E-Content and Digital Resource Hub

The concluding session by Prof. (Dr.) Dilip Barad focused on Multimodal E-Content Creation aligned with NEP 2020.

Distinguishing between pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy, he emphasized learner autonomy and discovery-based education. AI tools such as NotebookLM were demonstrated for creating structured, source-grounded digital content.

A key innovation was the introduction of a “Fifth Quadrant” to the SWAYAM model—integrating AI-based activities that promote critical thinking rather than passive consumption.

The session reinforced a central theme of the workshop: technology must serve pedagogy, not replace it.

This week-long workshop was more than a training programme—it was an intellectual journey bridging tradition and technology, scholarship and innovation, discipline and creativity.

Heartfelt gratitude is extended to:

• Prof. (Dr.) Dilip Barad, Convenor and Head of Department

• Co-convenors Ms. Megha Trivedi and Ms. Prakruti Bhatt

• The Promotion of Higher Education Knowledge Consortium (KCG), Government of Gujarat

• The dedicated students and volunteers

Their collective effort ensured the workshop’s smooth execution and lasting academic impact.

Conclusion

The National Workshop on Academic Writing at MKBU reaffirmed that academic writing is not merely a technical skill but an ethical, intellectual, and reflective practice. In an era shaped by Artificial Intelligence, the workshop emphasized that human judgment, originality, and integrity remain at the heart of scholarship.

The six days left participants not only better writers, but more responsible scholars—equipped to contribute meaningfully to the evolving landscape of higher education.

The joy of Motherhood

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

 Hello everyone,

This blog is a response to a flipped learning task which is assigned by Dr.Dilip.Barad sir based on Arundhati Roy’s novel ‘Ministry of Utmost Happiness’.

‘Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, Arundhati Roy's novel, is not one that revolves around one story, but rather brings together all the broken stories, allowing them to coexist. The novel weaves together experiences from Old Delhi, Gujarat, and Kashmir.

Anjum, who is a hijra, knits together an unusual home for the unwanted in a graveyard, while Tilo is a strange, quietly strong-willed woman whose life intricately becomes entwined with the politics of Kashmir. What appears to be two disparate stories eventually merges into how individual pain cannot be extricated from the historical past.

This novel is written in a fractured, non-linear style that mixes fiction, politics, memory, and poetry. Rather than providing easy solutions or closure, the novel encourages the reader to bear witness to the ways in which people continue to exist, love, and struggle in a deeply fractured world. This is a very powerful novel about finding small pockets of hope within a sea of despair.

Activity A: The "Shattered Story" Structure (Textual Analysis with ChatGPT)

1. Narrative Structure and Trauma in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness resists a conventional, linear narrative. Instead, it unfolds as a fragmented, polyphonic text that moves across time, geography, and subjectivities. This shattered structure is not a stylistic indulgence but a political and ethical necessity. The novel demonstrates how trauma personal, communal, and national cannot be told in a straight line. Roy’s narrative answers the question she implicitly poses: How do you tell a shattered story? Her answer is: by slowly becoming everything.

2.  Non-linearity as a Form of Traumatic Memory

Trauma theory suggests that traumatic experiences are not remembered sequentially but erupt in fragments, repetitions, and sudden returns. Roy mirrors this psychological reality through a non-linear timeline that moves between Old Delhi, Gujarat, Kashmir, and back again, often without smooth transitions.

Rather than beginning with a stable “origin,” the novel opens in the aftermath: Anjum already lives in a graveyard. Only later does the narrative return to her childhood as Aftab in the Khwabgah of Old Delhi. This backward movement reflects how trauma works—the wound is visible before its cause is fully known. The reader encounters the scar before the injury.

3. From Khwabgah to Graveyard: Spatial Shifts as Trauma Markers

The transition from Khwabgah (House of Dreams) in Old Delhi to the graveyard (later named Jannat Guest House) is one of the most powerful structural movements in the novel.

• Khwabgah represents a fragile, performative refuge for hijras already marginal, already provisional.

• The graveyard is not merely a setting but a narrative transformation: a space where the rejected dead and living coexist.
  
  

This shift is not linear progression but traumatic displacement. Anjum does not “move forward” in life; she is pushed sideways by the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. The massacre fractures her sense of time and belonging so completely that she exits ordinary social space altogether. Living among graves literalizes what trauma does metaphorically: it places the survivor outside normative time.

Roy does not narrate the pogrom as a single climactic event. Instead, it reverberates across the text, resurfacing in memory, fear, and spatial withdrawal. The graveyard becomes a narrative strategy—a place where broken timelines can coexist.

4. “Slowly Becoming Everything”: Multiplicity as Narrative Ethics

Rather than centering the novel on one protagonist, Roy allows the story to expand outward, absorbing multiple lives, histories, and conflicts. This is what “slowly becoming everything” means structurally:

• The novel begins with Anjum

• Shifts to Tilo

• Expands to Kashmir

• Absorbs political movements, footnotes, reports, letters, and testimonies
  
  

This refusal of narrative hierarchy reflects the ethics of trauma narration: no single story can contain the damage.

5. Tilo’s Kashmir Narrative: A Parallel Trauma

Tilo’s story in Kashmir does not follow Anjum’s chronologically, but it mirrors her thematically. Kashmir, like the graveyard, exists outside official time as a space of perpetual suspension, surveillance, and mourning.

Roy fractures Tilo’s narrative through:

• Letters

• Dossiers

• Interrogation records

• Interrupted memories
  
  

This documentary fragmentation reflects the political trauma of Kashmir, where truth is always partial and violently contested. Just as Anjum survives by creating an alternative world (Jannat), Tilo survives by refusing fixed identity—she remains elusive, resistant to closure.

6. The Found Baby: Narrative Convergence Without Linear Resolution

The novel’s most crucial structural convergence occurs through the found baby, Miss Jebeen the Second.

Importantly, this connection is not causal but relational:

• The baby emerges from the violence of Kashmir

• She is carried into Anjum’s graveyard-world

• She becomes the living bridge between two otherwise fragmented narratives
  
  

This moment does not “resolve” the novel. Instead, it reconfigures it. The baby represents a future that cannot be narrated through progress or redemption, only through care, improvisation, and coexistence.

Structurally, this is Roy’s ultimate answer to trauma:

Not healing through forgetting

Not unity through order

But survival through assemblage

7. Conclusion: A Shattered Nation Requires a Shattered Form

The non-linear narrative of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness reflects the psychic and political trauma of modern India—Partition, communal violence, caste oppression, state terror, and gendered marginalization. Roy refuses linear realism because linear realism belongs to stable nations and coherent histories, which her India is not.

By moving between Khwabgah and graveyard, between Anjum and Tilo, between Delhi and Kashmir, Roy shows that trauma cannot be told—it must be lived across forms. The novel becomes a shelter for fragments, just as Jannat becomes a shelter for the living and the dead.

In this way, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness teaches us not just how to read a shattered story, but how to inhabit one—by slowly, stubbornly, becoming everything.

Activity B:  Mapping the Conflict (Mind Mapping with NotebookLM)

Why a Graveyard is the Most Hopeful Place in India: 4 Shocking Truths from Arundhati Roy's Epic Novel

In a world that often feels fractured and hostile, where do we find true connection? 

In a society that sorts us into neat, opposing boxes, how do we find not just community, but what one critic calls “un-loneliness” a profound state of belonging among the dispossessed? Arundhati Roy’s epic novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, finds its answer in the most counter-intuitive of places: a graveyard. Twenty years after her debut, Roy returned with a sprawling story suggesting that true paradise isn’t found in purity and order, but in the radical acceptance of the broken. This article explores four of the most impactful truths the novel unearths from its city of the dead.

A Graveyard Becomes a Paradise for the Dispossessed

The novel’s central, paradoxical idea is the Jannat Guest House. Established by the protagonist Anjum—a hijra, or transgender woman—it is a home she builds for herself within the walls of a Delhi graveyard after a traumatic event makes her feel unwelcome in the world. But this is no somber place of death. Instead, it blossoms into what cultural theorists call a "heterotopia"—a real-world liminal space that operates outside society's norms. Here, in this utopian community for the dispossessed, the binary of life and death dissolves.

Slowly, the graveyard becomes a haven for what Roy calls the "fallen peoples." Its residents form a "Noah's ark" of the marginalized: hijras cast out from their communities, Dalits, the poor, homeless, Muslims, and even injured animals find refuge there. The Jannat Guest House redefines "home" not as a physical structure but as a community built on shared experience and mutual support, offering safety and freedom to those denied both. For many in India, living in a graveyard is not a metaphor but a stark reality; in Roy’s hands, this reality is transformed into a defiant paradise.

"the battered angels in the graveyard that keep watch over their battered charges h[old] open the doors between worlds […] so that the souls of the present and departed could mingle, like guests at the same party"

It's a Celebration of "Impurity" Here, Roy leverages the postmodern celebration of "contaminated diversity" to dismantle India's dangerous obsession with purity. 

The novel argues that purity is an illusion, a violent fiction used to justify exclusion. Instead, it champions the strength found in our messy, interwoven identities.

"we are contaminated by our encounters […] Everybody carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option."

Roy intentionally brings together characters who defy societal binaries. Anjum represents gender impurity—born with both male and female genitalia, she lives her life as a hijra, a community often perceived as "women trapped in men's bodies." Saddam Hussain embodies caste and religious impurity as a Dalit who converts to Islam. And then there is Tilo, the unconventional architect who represents a profound social impurity. Born out of wedlock to "an untouchable pariah, whereas her mother, a Syrian Christian," Tilo actively rejects society’s stereotypical notions of "marriage, relationships and motherhood." These characters find solidarity not in spite of their differences, but because of them, understanding that the turmoil of the outside world is something they carry within themselves.

"for us the price rise and school admissions and beating husbands and cheating wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t"

A Man Named Saddam Hussain Becomes a Symbol of Resistance

One of the most startling character arcs is that of Dayachand, a young Dalit man from the chamar (skinner) caste. He witnesses the horrific lynching of his father by a mob of "cow vigilantes," an act of brutality instigated by a corrupt police officer, Sherawat, because his father failed to pay a bribe (a "cut"). This traumatic event, an indictment of both mob violence and state corruption, shatters Dayachand's world.

In an act of profound defiance, he renounces his identity and religion, converts to Islam, and renames himself Saddam Hussain. His inspiration comes from watching the televised execution of the real Iraqi president. He saw a man who, despite being captured and sentenced to death by a global superpower, faced his end with dignity, without begging for his life. For Dayachand, adopting the name of a reviled dictator is not an endorsement of his politics but a personal form of resistance—a way of standing up to the mighty, oppressive local authorities that destroyed his family. The name becomes a shield, turning a symbol of international tyranny into one of personal power against the very forces reflected in the chilling chants of Hindu mobs.

"Mussalman ka ek hi sthan! Qubristan ya Pakistan! Only one place for the Mussalman! The Graveyard or Pakistan"

The Way the Story is Told is Part of the Story Itself

Readers often describe The Ministry of Utmost Happiness as having a "frustratingly rambling" narrative structure. The story is not a linear journey but a "collage of narrative," a "salad bowl" that accommodates a multitude of fragmented voices. This is a deliberate artistic choice. Roy creates a "polyglot verse," incorporating "Urdu, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Hinglish... Whatsapp-lingo, Indian bureaucratese, Shayari, Hindi film songs," and more.

The novel’s form perfectly mirrors its content. By subverting the idea of a single, coherent "grand narrative" told in a hegemonic language, Roy reflects the fractured, chaotic, and multifaceted reality of the world she depicts. The story is shattered because the lives of its characters, and the society they inhabit, are shattered. This forces us, the readers, to piece together a vision of the world from multiple, often conflicting, perspectives—just as the residents of the Jannat Guest House must piece together a life from the broken fragments of their pasts. The book’s own back cover offers the most eloquent explanation of its method.

"How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No By slowly becoming everything."

The Un-Loneliness of the Broken

Ultimately, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness locates its hope not in perfection or purity, but in the messy, compassionate, and defiant act of coming together. In the graveyard, a space for the dead, the characters discover the profound "un-loneliness" of the living. They find solace and the strength to resist a world that has tried to erase them. By embracing the broken, the marginalized, and the "impure," Roy’s novel builds a powerful monument to the resilience of the human spirit. It leaves us with a critical question: In a world that demands we fit into neat boxes, what power might we find in embracing our own "impurities"?