my time to shine!
i didn't go to these godforsaken institutions, but i had friends in gradschool who did.
one of them was a slightly older guy, who decided he had a crush on me. if you have a crush on a girl, what do you do? you ask her out, or pine away, or pine for a bit before you tell her how you feel. right? our sathyabhama man decided the best course of action was to tell the whole town he had a crush on me, with the exception of course being me.
he'd actually organize events to get to talk to me. i was super socially awkward however and bailed on 99% of those events. i genuinely had no idea he had feelings for me.
he became friends with me and everything, and decided to tell me he'd received an anonymous email from some friend of mine who told him i was going to ask him out and to let me down gently. my friends of course would do no such thing and i began getting creeped out.
then he told me he wanted to marry me, even though he had spoken to his folks about me and they didn't approve of me, because i wasn't tamil or whatever. that creeped me out to no end because who the fuck speaks to parents so soon? i said no. he went insane and began stalking me online, offline, all over the place. i tried ignoring it, but once i ran a red light in some location i don't usually go to, and he actually called me and said i shouldn't run red lights..... which was when i realized it had gotten out of hand and cut all contact off.
there was another girl from those colleges as well. she had a crush on a male friend of mine, he didn't reciprocate, she went around telling the whole city that he was her boyfriend. now since this guy and i were friends, and hung out together often, she spread rumors that he was in a relationship with her and cheating on her with me.
thanks to these two people, my life in gradschool became a living hell with having to constantly explain to every single person in the indian community that i wasn't a homewrecker and that im not going to say yes to the 'nice man who wanted to marry me' because he's a creepy ass stalker who gave me mental torture enough to mess with my research.