incredibly thrilled to have graduated from my second Master’s Degree awarded with a Distinction and with A+ on my final portfolios & dissertation. ❤️🔥
moving forward with the beautiful words spoken by Baroness Ashton, Warwick University’s first ever woman chancellor, as one of my precepts in life: assume that anyone you ever meet knows something you don’t. further, i was moved by two of our professors’ kind reminders to us, which i will share here.
first: yes, what we have achieved is great and we must celebrate it “wildly and loudly”; and yet, we must not be complacent and rest on our laurels. don’t stop; keep moving. there is always room for refinement, growth, expansion. of course, there is and there isn’t – as in, the whole is not separate from the parts, and the part is still the whole even if it appears part, as the Upaniṣads teach us. and yet; when the grasping to knowledge that comes from insecurity and self-loathing begins to stop… glimpses of the human potentiality that is never-ending yet whole begin to become accessible.
second: do not hoard knowledge. do not claim it as solely your own. share generously.
grateful our professors reminded us of our limitations. onward with enthusiasm and dedication to knowledge and to perfecting my craft.
finally… this is my third degree yet first awarding ceremony i have attended due to pandemic reasons and life circumstances, so i was especially excited to have this experience. 🥰
gratitude to my professors, supervisors, family, colleagues and friends. 🙏
over the moon to share that i have submitted by MA dissertation, entitled: “Mapping the Absolute: The Iconography of the Daśa Mahāvidyās” 
) to explore the deities from a cosmogenic standpoint was sown during a retreat i attended in 2020 that was centred on the first five of the Mahāvidyās, led by Kavithaji & Hareesh Wallis. i was spellbound listening to Kavithaji present the Goddesses as non-dual expressions of cosmological creative forces and i was concomitantly dismayed to realise that all the material i had encountered which addressed them was rooted in strong misconceptions. poignantly, the distortion & appropriation of the Goddesses in popular culture & western scholarship appear to majorly stem from the legacy of colonialist writings – and, i tried to offer my small contribution towards the deconstruction of the colonial / orientalist gaze through this thesis. 
taking a moment to gush: my final year as an undergrad was so very precious to me, as it represented the first big leap i took with my writing. dissertation-wise, i wanted to focus on what Richard Leonard calls “the mystical gaze” of cinema: cinema’s arguably innate fascination with the esoteric that enables the viewer to encounter the transcendent. although my supervisor advised me that it could be a tricky topic, i felt curiously pulled to it and decided to trust my gut – and so, my dissertation addressed the archaic imagery emerging in commercial cinema as seen through a Jungian gaze & argued that cinematic archetypes unveil layers of the psyche. 
amaryllis 