I still remember my mock defence with Sarju Sing Rai & Durwin Lynch. I was holding my thesis like my living, breathing baby. Every question felt like someone poking her & I'd be the tiger mom. These two were the kindest mock committee possible, while I was still in the survival mode. One of them asked, “Seema, have you explored the role of colonization?” & out of my exhausted mouth came, “What is colonization?” The second I said it, I knew exactly what had just happened. Their faces were doing that restrained, academic version of trying not to fall off their chairs. Meanwhile I was so done that even explaining lenses felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. All I wanted was to finish, crawl into bed, & sleep for a month. Maybe a year. Maybe until humanity stopped asking me to defend why lived experiences matter. What I didn’t see then but I see now is that this moment itself was the impact of colonization. The pressure to sound a certain way, write a certain way, obey a certain tone. The pressure to fit neatly into what academia deems as science, what academia claims as art, what it treats as fact, & what it dismisses as emotion or fiction. My body was fighting to survive inside a system that cared far more about how I sounded than what I was actually trying to say. Like anyone who has lived inside something for too long, I couldn’t see the shape of the structure while sitting inside it. It reminds me of my nephew, when a toddler, had travelled for hours in a train without realising it. Only when he stepped onto the platform, looked back, & saw the full train did he shout “Train, train!” Inside it, he couldn’t recognise where he was. Outside it, everything clicked. That mock defence did exactly that for me. It showed me the structure I had been sitting inside, the pressure to be acceptable, obedient, correct in formats shaped by someone else’s worldview. Only when I saw it from the outside did I realise how much energy had gone into defending not just my thesis but my right to speak in my own language of knowing. For the final defence, something shifted. I stopped twisting my voice into what I imagined the committee wanted. I stopped trying to protect their comfort while protecting my work. If anyone needed clarity, they could ask. We could talk. I didn’t need to reshape myself to feel safe. Looking back, I see how easily a person can absorb expectations without realising it. Capacity wears thin, the body pushes through, & suddenly “What is colonization?” slips out while the brain watches in disbelief. That moment told me how deep inside the system I had been, without noticing how much of myself I had folded away to survive it. So this part matters to say. Thank you, Sarju & Durwin. You named what I was living inside long before I was able to see it. You held up the mirror I needed. That moment changed how I walked into my final defence, & it has taken me four years to put that gratitude into words.
