The Ashoka campus is a battlefield for all the days it takes the Earth to circle the Sun. Whether it’s vicious attacks from the sprinklers that slice open your skin in the cold or snippets of conversation about everyone’s sex lives that you try to dodge, the horrors of walking around campus are inescapable.
The first day of college is a special thing for a first-year, and my experience was made insurmountably more special with the intellectually “stimulating” discussions I had about my to-be professors. My first impressions of faculty in Ashoka were molded by tidbits of gossip about their personal lives that started as seeds of harmless curiosity, but soon grew into overarching shrubs of obsession that seemed to forget the existence of professional boundaries. Discussions about philosophy courses would quickly devolve into pretentious analyses of the philosophical morality of some professors, injected with exaggerations of their amoral sexcapades and awakenings - (W)TF?
I knew that half of Ashoka’s student population majors in psychology, but I didn’t know they dabbled in couples’ therapy, too! The student body truly contains multitudes, which seem to revolve around their professors’ relationships. If the student population talked this much about their own relationships, maybe so many of us wouldn’t have commitment issues (definitely not speaking from experience!).
This obsessive hunger with professors’ personal lives extends beyond the gay agenda and marital tragedy. The conversations surrounding Ashoka’s most popular pairing embody a cult-like curiosity that seems to stem from excessive admiration of these professors. Speculations about the dynamics of their relationship and their interactions with each other go beyond a longing for something similar, instead creating the space for a parasocial relationship with these professors.
Why look for something in the real world when you can imagine inserting yourself into a relationship between academic authorities decades older than you, right?
Glimpses of them holding hands or sharing meals are fuel for the burning fixation on their relationship - a fixation that is only heightened by the cult-like fascination surrounding one of these professors. Professor Meena Manavan is a name that resounds in the hearts of everyone at Ashoka, but more intensely in some than others. Their brilliance cannot be contested, which is why the campus is plagued with Manavan fanatics who overstep the very-distinct-and-incredibly-obvious line between professional and personal.
Offhand comments such as “The first time I heard about Manavan and Harish, my heart broke a little” (said by a girl I like, so I’m starting a petition for an FC on “How to have as much game as Manavan,” please sign), and frantic tweets detailing a student’s every interaction with them are a normalized part of the average Ashokan’s life.
Ignorance seems to be bliss at Ashoka when it comes to the formation of an uncomfortable parasocial relationship between a student and their professor, but not when I leave RH3 two seconds after the curfew? Ashoka sure knows how to prioritize problems!
But, I have to give credit where it’s due - Ashokans are nothing if not inclusive. This trend of obsessive admiration, bordering on perversion, does not show mercy to the Pol Sci or IR departments either! In a world where political science and international relations are not given a second thought, the Ashoka student body is their saving grace. The appreciation of intellect surpasses innocence and dips into an absurd fetishization of these professors.
PSA: Feeling genuine heartbreak over finding out your professor has a spouse after stalking their social media is not normal - get into a situationship like the rest of us do!
As is with cults, the sustained existence of the blurred lines between professional and personal relationships with professors is facilitated by the constant discussion around it. Embodying an heirloom, the same gossip about faculty is fed to newer batches of students who, (mostly) coming from the barren wasteland of CBSE and ICSE, internalize the obsessions of their seniors. The absurd romanticization of a power dynamic is created, making for professor-student connections that transcend academic affiliation. Leave this trope to the Wattpad authors please - (un)fortunately, your life is not a Student! Y/N x Professor!Damon Salvatore fanfic.
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