Listen to this blog
There are two kinds of microphones in the world of Dr Aruna Doreen Manezes, Assistant Professor and Programme Coordinator for Management Courses at MAHE Online, and she has learned to pick up each one with equal confidence. The first is the quiet, digital kind – muted and unmuted across the rhythms of an online class, carrying lessons in management, carrying learner questions, carrying the small but significant pauses when a concept finally lands and you can almost sense the shift happening on the other side of the screen. The second is the real kind: handheld, warm under stage lights, extended toward an audience that has come expecting to feel something, and rarely leaves disappointed.
To her students, she is a thoughtful mentor and a steadying presence — someone who remembers that the person on the other side of the assignment portal has a story worth paying attention to. To her audiences, she is a performer of genuine warmth, an emcee who commands a room not through volume but through conviction. And to those fortunate enough to know her in both worlds, she is simply someone who has always understood that teaching and performing, for all their apparent differences, are animated by the very same impulse: the desire to connect, to reach across the space between people, and to make that space feel a little smaller.
“I’m equally confident with a mic or a laptop.”
MIC ONE: THE CLASSROOM
Teaching as a Way of Seeing People
Her background in psychology did not simply furnish her with a subject to teach – it gave her an entirely different way of entering a room, or in the case of online education, an entirely different way of entering a screen. Where another faculty member might see a cohort of learners, she sees a collection of individual journeys, each one shaped by circumstances that no syllabus could anticipate. “Every learner comes with a story,” she reflects, “a unique background,” and it is this awareness, absorbed through years of studying human behaviour and motivation, that has quietly transformed the way she teaches.
In the context of online education, where the temptation to reduce teaching to content delivery is perhaps strongest, she has chosen a different path. Her most defining insight from years in the virtual classroom is that no amount of technological sophistication can substitute for genuine human engagement, and that meaningful connections between faculty and learners are not only possible in digital spaces but are, in fact, the very thing that makes those spaces worth inhabiting. Through thoughtful discussions, personalized communication, and a willingness to acknowledge the emotional dimensions of learning alongside the academic ones, she has built classrooms, virtual though they may be, where learners feel genuinely seen.
The evidence of this lives not in metrics but in the messages she receives long after a course has ended: thank-you notes that speak not of examination scores but of perspective shifts, of small conversations that arrived at exactly the right moment, of values modelled quietly and carried forward into lives she will never fully see. “Ma’am, you have not only taught the subject but also values which will be remembered forever” – it is precisely this kind of feedback that gives her the deepest sense of contentment and reaffirms, time and again, that she has chosen the right profession. And on convocation day, watching a learner cross the stage who fought through obstacles most people would never guess at, she feels the full, unhurried weight of what it means to have been part of that journey.
“The learner’s emotional well-being is also important. Not just their academic growth.”
When learners arrive at that inevitable wall, that moment of exhaustion or self-doubt when giving up seems like the only rational option, her counsel is characteristic in its candour and its refusal to offer empty encouragement. “Count your blessings and acknowledge your achievements,” she tells them, asking them to turn toward what they have already built rather than fixating on what still feels out of reach. Beyond any specific lesson she might impart, the quality she most hopes her students carry forward is resilience: not the brittle, performative kind, but the deep-rooted capacity to bounce back, to adapt, to hold on to belief in oneself even when the path forward is anything but clear.
MIC TWO: THE STAGE
A Voice Shaped by Faith and Music
Music did not arrive in her life as a sudden discovery or a later-in-life revelation — it was always there, woven into the texture of her earliest years through church gatherings and community prayers, absorbed so naturally into her sense of self that it is difficult, she says, to imagine who she would be without it. Over time, what had begun as a childhood presence grew into something far more deliberate and sustaining: a practice of expression, a language for gratitude and faith and emotion, a way of processing the interior life that words alone could not quite reach. Singing, as she describes it, is her emotional recharge — the thing she returns to when the demands of teaching and mentoring and everyday life have quietened, the thing that fills her back up.
Today, she sings and anchors events professionally, performing at family celebrations, live gatherings, and online reality show platforms, carrying her voice into spaces as intimate as a living room and as expansive as a concert stage. Among the performances that have meant the most to her are those she has shared with her husband, who is not merely a spouse but a genuine musical collaborator – someone whose strengths complement her own in ways that elevate what either of them could achieve alone.
When asked which artist she would most want to emcee a concert for, she answers without hesitation: Don Moen, whose music has accompanied her spiritual life for as long as she can remember, offering strength and direction in the quiet moments that performance can never quite capture.
There is, she admits, a particular kind of nervousness that comes with emceeing, something distinct from the steady, prepared confidence of the classroom, demanding instant energy and a seamless presence that cannot be planned for in quite the same way. But she has come to regard that nervousness not as something to be managed or overcome but as something to be welcomed, a signal that she is fully present and fully awake to the moment, the kind of aliveness that keeps both the performer and the performance honest.
WHERE THE TWO MICS MEET
One Voice, Two Callings
What unites these two worlds – the online classroom and the performance stage, the faculty portal and the concert hall – is not simply a coincidence of talent but something more considered and more deeply held: a belief that showing up fully, with one’s whole self and genuine intention, is in itself a form of service to the people in the room. Whether she is guiding a learner through a moment of self-doubt with the careful attentiveness that only someone trained in human psychology can offer, or anchoring an event with the warm authority of someone entirely at home under the lights, she is, at the core of it, doing the same thing – using her voice to reach people, to steady them, to remind them that they are not alone in whatever they are experiencing.
Stories like hers are not incidental to what Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) Online stands for – they are the very heart of it. MAHE Online has always believed that exceptional education is built not by systems alone, but by people who bring their whole selves to the act of teaching. In choosing faculty who are not only academically accomplished but richly lived, MAHE Online continues to redefine what online education can truly be.
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