College: Pathways Of Possibility

What are the avenues of postsecondary educational experience available to the student in India today?

Can college education be tailored to one's specific talents and meaningful to the world at the same time?

Is there indeed such a thing as native intelligence? What is the ideal education to bring such intelligences to life?

What are the possible curricular relationships between the arts and the sciences; the qualitative and the quantitative, the theoretical and the experiential?

How deeply should a college education be rooted in a discipline? Should one cultivate one disciplinary strength or multiple ones?

What is more valued by employers - depth or range?

College provides accessible answers to these questions that resonates on a wide range of life aspirations, guiding students to the possibilities contained in the rapidly changing realm of higher education across the world today. It is an erudite and interesting guide to the possibilities contained in the rapidly changing realm of higher education today.

It is essential reading for current and future college students, their parents, educators and anybody interested in the rich potential in the terrain of post-secondary education in post-millennial India.

Saikat Majumdar is a novelist and critic. He is the author of five novels: Silverfish (2007), The Firebird (2015), published as Play House in the US (2017), The Scent of God (2019), The Middle Finger (2022), and The Remains of the Body (2024). His books of nonfiction/criticism are Prose of the World (2013), College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), The Amateur: Self-Making the Humanities in the Postcolony (2014), the co-edited collection, The Critic as Amateur (2019), and most recently, Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial (2026)

Saikat is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University and has been a faculty member at Stanford University, a Fellow at Wellesley College and at the institutes of Advanced Study in Budapest and Stellenbosch, and at Transilvania University (Romania) and the University of the Free State (South Africa).