Preetham Adiga

 When Dhanwanti Nayak wrote “The Importance of Being Useless,” she was defending something beautiful. She was defending literature, philosophy, art—the parts of education that don’t immediately produce profits, patents, or PowerPoint presentations. The things people call “useless.” Her argument was simple: what looks useless is often what makes us human. Poetry teaches empathy. History teaches perspective. Philosophy teaches doubt. Without them, we produce professionals who can operate machines but cannot understand people. It’s a powerful argument. Unfortunately, universities misunderstood the assignment. They didn’t defend useless knowledge. They became useless themselves. Two Kinds of Uselessness There are two kinds of uselessness in the world. The first kind is the one Nayak celebrates. This is the uselessness of curiosity. Reading novels. Thinking about society. Studying culture. This uselessness produces ideas. The second kind is the uselessness perfect...

People often laugh when they hear about my PhD topic. “Memes?” they ask. “You did a PhD on memes?” Yes. But the real joke wasn’t the memes. The real joke was the academic system that forced me to study them. And the two elderly gatekeepers who made sure four years of my life became the punchline. How This Started: I Made the Mistake of Having Real Experience I did my master’s from a well-known media institute. After graduating, I did something that academia often treats as suspicious behavior: I worked in the real world. For four years, I worked in a digital marketing agency. Content writing. Branding. Social media management. Actual campaigns. Actual audiences. Actual money being spent and earned. In other words: the exact ecosystem universities claim to be preparing students for. So when I applied for a PhD at the same institute, I proposed something radical. I wanted to research the gap between digital marketing education and real industry practice. A shocking idea, ap...