Harassment: Unruly circumstances

“Academia is a place that has long been considered safe compared to the corporate world. At least that’s what I believed until I became a victim of harassment during a conference in a renowned college in Jaipur. I pondered for a long time whether the incident that happened with me could be termed as harassment because it wasn’t physical abuse; it was a tremendous mental pressure created on a girl scholar by a middle-aged male professor.

The first day of the conference went well and I received the best paper award. Many people congratulated me and among them, this one professor was overly nice to me. He not only congratulated me on campus, but post the two day conference he sent me his number on Facebook and asked me to contact him. He started texting me while I was back at the hotel. At first, he told me that my participation certificate was with him and I needed to meet him to collect that. There seemed nothing abnormal in that, so I agreed to collect it the next day from college. Shockingly, he was not happy with me meeting him in college; he rather insisted that I meet him for dinner and started sending me suggestions of various hangout places in and around the city.

I conveyed this conversation to my partner, who suggested that I should meet him at a cafe just a few metres away from the main campus because that would serve my purpose of getting my much…