7 min readNagpurOct 14, 2026 07:09 AM IST First published on: Oct 14, 2026 at 07:00 AM ISTHis spectacles broke on the way to work. Sitting in his small cabin at Gondwana University, Mallojula Venugopal chuckles as he reaches for them: “Now I will have to get a new pair made.”As the 70-year-old fusses over his glasses and his laptop, sitting behind a desk bare except for some newspapers (including The Indian Express), his crisp shirt firmly tucked in, his dark hair slickly combed down, the difference from his previous life couldn’t be starker.