Within the postgraduate departments and PhD hallways of India’s colleges, a quiet but profound displacement is occurring, one that carries a sharp, stinging weight. Amidst a sea of twenty two year old classmates fresh, unburdened, and focused on the start of their journey sits the Returning Scholar. Usually aged forty five or older, this individual is often a parent, a seasoned professional, or a teacher who has managed the complex storms of a household and a career for decades. At the front of the room stands a faculty member of twenty nine or thirty.
By the metrics of the institution, one is the authority and the other is the student. But by the metrics of life, the roles are reversed. When the academic system demands that this forty five year old scholar strip away their history and adopt the submissive posture of a junior, it commits a quiet, cultural violence that cuts to the very bone.
For a twenty two year old, a grade is a number. For the older woman, a 75 per cent mark is a triumph written in the margins of a grueling life. It is a grade earned at 4:00 AM before the milkman arrives; it was earned in the exhausted hours after the family slept, the bills were paid, and the children were tended to.
When a young teacher who may have moved straight from their own PhD into a teaching post looks down upon this achievement with a dismissive grilling, they are not just judging a paper. They are insulting the sheer sacrifice it took to get to that desk, wounding a spirit that has already weathered so much.
Younger faculty must realise they are not Gurus moulding a blank slate; they are necessary facilitators, cogs in the wheel of a journey that was long delayed but never abandoned.
In the Indian social fabric, respect is a currency that should flow both ways. For the older man returning to the classroom, being addressed solely by his first name by a thirty year old professor is a calculated diminishment, a cold dismissal of his lived years.
While the professor naturally expects to be addressed as Sir or Madam due to their institutional position, they lose nothing by extending a similar age based courtesy to an elder. Integrating a simple Ji after his/her name, or addressing him as Sir or her as Madam, recognises his/her standing as a human being.
Verbal cues for submission should never be expected; instead, a mutual exchange of professional titles creates an environment of shared dignity. It signals that while the professor holds the academic keys, they respect the life that is sitting in the chair, rather than ignoring the toll that life has taken.
There is a specific, heavy sorrow in being forced to act smaller than you are. To expect an individual of experience to shrink into the role of an erring child just because they are in a classroom is an act of identity erasure. It strips them of the armour they have built over a lifetime of service, leaving them exposed to the whims of those who have yet to be tested by time.
When a young professor chooses a show of power over professional empathy, they do not uphold academic standards. Instead, they create a hollow theatre of ego. In a room where the teacher is thirty and the student is forty five, the interaction should be a handshake of professional peers, one providing the technical gatekeeping, the other providing the lived wisdom.
The twenty two year old classmates are at an age where they believe status is derived solely from rank. When they see a young professor treat an elder student with a total lack of age deference, they learn a dangerous lesson: that life experience, parenthood, and decades of professional service have no value once you enter a bureaucratic system.
However, if the professor models social intelligence by using respectful honorifics and acknowledging the student’s background, they teach the youth something profound. They show that education is not about who is above whom, but about the mutual recognition of effort. They teach the younger students that ageing is not a process of becoming lesser, but a process of becoming more.
Younger faculty members must shed the ego of the Master. They hold the pen that signs the certificate, but the older student is the engine that has travelled the hard road to get to the desk. To show respect for their age is not to soften the exam; it is to acknowledge the reality of the human being sitting across the table. Rigorous questioning and age based courtesy can coexist. One can examine a thesis with clinical precision while still addressing the candidate with the respect their years have earned them, avoiding the casual cruelty of intellectual superiority.
Education should never require an individual to leave their pride at the door. In the landscape of Indian academia, we must protect the older student from the unintentional arrogance of the young expert.
We must ensure that when a scholar of forty five finishes their defence, they walk out with more than just a credential. They should walk out with their head held high, knowing that while the thirty year old at the front may have been at the head of the class, they were the one who taught the room, through their very presence, what it truly means to be a person of substance.
Respect is not a gift the professor gives the student; it is a debt the youth owes to the life that came before them, a debt that, when left unpaid, leaves the academy a poorer, colder place.
