Three years back, Tuhina had blogged about the exclusivity and uniqueness of her name. And how people get it wrong, mispronounce it and the like.
And of late, I see this:
My name is nowhere near as unique or exclusive. My first name is as common as can get. And so is my patronymic. People do tend to misspell Venkateshan…. they miss out the ‘h’, but that’s about it when it comes to misspelling my name.. unlike Tuniha’s Tuhani’s Tuna’s name.
So I was feeling all nice when I saw that over the past couple of weeks, a large number of hits on this blog were through the search term ‘Priya Venkatesan’.
And then I come across a post on Nanopolitan which links to the strange, twisted case of tale of Priya Venkatesan (Nanopolitan’s Sepia Mutiny’s words, not mine).
The initial shock on reading Nanopolitan’s post was a bit too much to take, especially since I couldn’t recollect having done anything to merit adjectives like ’strange’ and ‘twisted’… I’ve considered the past couple of weeks of my life the zenith of boring.
Turns out I have a namesake – well, not quite… she doesn’t have the ‘h’ in her name – who teaches/taught English at Dartmouth, and who seems to be suffering from persecution mania. According to that link, she
- Is suing her class for harassment as she feels some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment.
- Feels her students were “very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful” as “They’d argue with your ideas.”
But the most ridiculous-sounding one was
Last week, a few students in the Dartmouth writing class “Science, Technology, and Society” received a nasty shock. When they checked their inboxes, they learned that their professor, Priya Venkatesan, was planning to sue them for discrimination. Later investigations revealed that she also planned to sue the College and several faculty members, not referring to any particular episode, but mentioning the “hostility” she felt during her time as a professor and saying that “maybe it has something to do with my ethnicity or my gender.”
Oh, I don’t know… maybe this lady is quite justified in her arguments and maybe it’s just a media smear campaign to taint her good name and make her look like she’s lost her marbles… or maybe she really is one for NIMHANS… I have nil clue. All I know is I am not her she, and I’m glad as hell for it, either way.
In a reader
