idk y’all should treat fat men better. and i don’t mean mildly chubby guys i mean honest-to-god love-handles-and-double-chins fat guys. stop calling them shit like discord mods or gross weebs or nasty creeps or neckbeards or that they’re stinky or sweaty or beer bellied or whatever else. fatphobia isn’t cute, even repackaged in a neat little box of “ew men”

lol i didnt want to hijack @oldshrewsburyian 's excellent posts about jodhaa/akbar in a campus AU so im just making a post of my own

basically i straight up despise business dept snakes so while i do think she's correct that jalal would be a good match for that dept i think i'd either put him in the econ or pol sci departments, maybe even international relations? pol sci and IR especially appeal to me as extremely problematic academic spaces where its possible for professors to flit between the academy and the private/public sphere with relative ease. i think of jalal as some rising star in these departments, maybe even developmental economics where he can feel like he's doing good work but when you look deeper these solutions he's advocating are bandaids at best or predatory schemes to force privatization in exchange for debt-relief. (i also think that the pol sci dept at my school is the rotting abscess of our humanities/social science community to theres that too.) the other thing he could be involved in is security either national or global which is also a dicey field lol. i pull more from the movie where he's less ruthless and more naive i think, so i see him as just born into a "political" family, maybe even something where his parents were very important but had to leave so he's still brought up in exile. he doesnt really go "back" but instead devotes himself to being an academic focused on the region trying to figure out how to "pull people out of poverty" via global investment or w/e. he's charming, good looking, charismatic, so he's on a lot of boards and does global talks despite being relatively early career in comparison to peers -- not to mention his family privilege that could give him some name recognition!

maybe they're both new hires, though jalal has a guaranteed tenure path while jodhaa is on a precarious 3 year contract after which she can apply for a permanent job that she may or may not get (the ridiculous and exploitative structure at my university rip.) jodhaa can be either a specialist in premodern devotional literature (a professor i love works on braj basha and punjabi so im kind of pulling from her lol) or she can be one of those super cool interdisciplinary scholars whose home is in the rlg dept. either way she'd obviously be teaching broader survey courses as well as her upper level seminars. they meet at one of those ridiculous mixers for new hires and jodhaa who has a much more radical analytic than jalal expects to hate him on sight but realizes that he's charming. stupid and probably dangerous bc of it, but charming nontheless. jalal is just smitten on sight which is hilarious bc everyone is expecting him to marry a similarly powerful, intelligent, worldly woman and instead he's head over heels with this grumpy academic who works with texts and rails against the neoliberal academy on twitter where her profile pic is her brother's cat. (my professor is way too nice to be grumpy but she's a textualist who is radical on twitter its great and i love her sm lol)

jodhaa and jalal can be kind of cross appointed to south asian studies as well and maybe in their second year on staff they have to jointly teach the intro course for that? idk how plausible that is, but i could see jalal thinking it's a great opportunity to meet and inspire new students so he asks for it, and jodhaa as a prof that's gotten rave reviews from her year of teaching is volunteered to do it with him. there's friction ofc but slowly they learn more about each other, their backgrounds and where they're coming from. there's a blowout at the very end of the summer (which they mostly pass together, each working on their manuscripts and convincing the other to take breaks from working at the local cafe in order to walk to the local park) and jodhaa begins her application process for a tenure track position bc her 3 years are up. they basically don't talk for a hot minute and throughout this time jalal does A LOT of reading until, over time, he comes to his revelations about how ridiculous and bootlicking his discipline is and finally sheds the shackles of the Man and starts cyberbullying people on twitter. its great!

i agree that jalal has a cat which for a while is probably his greatest appeal to jodhaa who for a hot minute thinks that he's everything wrong with academia lmao. maham anga could be the crotchety head of the south asian studies dept (powerful but not necessarily either of their direct boss bc their primary appointments are with other depts.) jalal's dad is a politician who died in exile, his mom an international philanthropist/socialite? jodhaa comes from a middle class bookish family in india, her cousin-brother sujamal is either a lawyer or a trade union activist (or both) which is how she comes by her politics. sujamal is an honorable passionate person and i didnt want them to be royalty and i didnt want him to be part of the army so this is my next best solution lol. i really dont know how the plot really comes into play, but i do love academia aus lmao!