Shiven Jain

  

Volume 9 | Issue III | September 2025

Indus International School ’25 | Pune, India

Stanford University ’29

  

  

Volume 8 | Issue I | March 2024

  

My love for film criticism predates my love for the movies themselves: ever since the age of five, my biweekly visits to the cinema have been the sole sacrosanct ritual of my youth, and it is this passion that I have carried into my tryst with filmic academia. In this spirit, I have learnt that the study of multimodal media is as anthropological as it is formal, and that the sociocultural inflections informing cinematic languages are what have most deeply influenced my writing. Such inspiration also stems from recognising that, for far too long, studies of the subaltern have been constrained to the literary medium alone. Yet in a world where our sense of media literacy is—for better or worse—shaped as much by TikTok as by books, that approach no longer suffices. And so, through my paper, “Partitioned Dreams and Plastic Fantasies,” I intend to reclaim agency by grounding academic frameworks that are inherently literary in nature within the non-literary instead. I remain ever grateful for the generosity of those at The Schola, who have not only helped me navigate theoretically dense arguments and avoid redundancies but have also instilled in me an ethos that prizes the love of learning for its own sake, rather than the extrinsic achievements that follow such critical engagement. Above all, it is this lesson to which I am most deeply indebted.