What followed for Dr. Chodha was an unremarkable decade in private practice as a psychoanalyst to the ageing boomers of northeast Illinois. While in the early aughts his legacy enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity thanks in most part to the rise of cable news personalities who found in his work academic ammunition for their salvos in the Culture War, Dr. Chodha never recaptured the aura of his '80's self. Perhaps that was why he had insisted so hard for Viral to attend Emory for college and then his doctorate. Viral imagined his father saw in his son a Trojan Horse through which he could reconquer the department he had been unceremoniously asked to leave.
The stand Viral took against his father was the most terrifying moment of his life. Though he knew his dad would not strike him, the anger that surged through his body gave Viral a moment's pause of reconsideration. Fortunately, or not, Modhi's dependence on alcohol offered him an alternative outlet for his disappointment other than Viral's face. As justification for his decision to attend Brown in Rhode Island Viral pointed to the patina of the Ivy League. His father had scoffed at the suggestion. "Columbia is the Ivy League," he'd said. In Modhi's view, Brown, like Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, was the dingleberry caught in the ass hair of the Ivies. They were inclusions to the vaunted list motivated by politics and money. To Modhi, the Ivy League was and would always be Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia -- in that order, forever and ever, amen.
His father's classification of the Ivy League as a select, arbitrary collection of three schools felt intentional to Viral because they were the colleges to which he was not admitted. Even his wait-list appointment at UPenn was enough to knock the college from it's Ivy pedestal in Modhi's eyes. Any school that accepted his son, even on a conditional basis, was unfit for his standards of excellence.
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Yet when Viral challenged his father's view on the value of schools as they related to their perception of his son, Dr. Chodha did not apply his rubric for prestige to his old stomping grounds of Emory. For reasons Viral could not discern at the time, even though Emory had not only accepted his son but also offered an immediate entry to its graduate program, Modhi did not disparage Emory as a second tier college that had sullied its reputation by deigning to accept Viral. In fact, Dr. Chodha had argued passionately for his son to attend the private college in Georgia. His father had even gone so far as to take his son out for a cheeseburger to lay the pitch on thick.
In the end, Viral chose Brown because it was what his father wanted for him the least. Dr. Chodha's hypocrisy regarding the eminence of Emory vs Cornell, for example, had revealed to Viral that his father's motivation to send his son to college in the South had little to do with opportunity and much to do with prestige. His own prestige, not his son's, and Viral could not stomach eight more years of serving as a tool for his father's ambitions. It was bad enough that Viral had worked himself into a palimpsest of boils through countless all-nighters in high school to maintain a position in the top 3% of his graduating class. He'd done his job as an Indian son; he'd gained admittance to the Ivy League. He'd even secured a healthy scholarship to subsidize his study of computer science. But the name on the acceptance letter wasn't the brand name Modhi aimed to fasten to the rear window of his BMW. It was Emory, or bust, in Modhi's mind for his son's foreseeable future. In a pinch, Stanford would have sufficed.