The Hindu : New Delhi News : Lunch with Putin and food for thought in Moscow

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 08, 2007
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New Delhi

Lunch with Putin and food for thought in Moscow

It is not every day that an Indian professor gets to share a lunch table with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Rector-II of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Ramadhikari Kumar, recently had the honour of meeting Mr. Putin when he went to Moscow to attend the inaugural meeting of the Assembly of Russian World Fund -- Russia’s first-ever global institution for the development of its language and culture.

The Fund was created in June this year.

More than 125 experts of Russian language, literature and culture were invited from different countries for the event that was organised at the Moscow State University.

Prof. Kumar, who teaches Russian at the Centre for Russian Studies in JNU’s School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies and is the president of the Indian Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature, attended the two-day event earlier this month.

The JNU professor was one of the two experts who were asked to deliver a speech at a plenary session at the University, interestingly, also his alma mater.

“I spoke on the development of teaching of Russian language, literature and promotion of Indo-Russian cultural relations in India. In the afternoon session, I presented a paper on the status of Russian language, literature teaching in our country and nature of collaborations, agreements that JNU has with other universities. There were many international delegates who expressed their desire to tie up with JNU,” Prof. Kumar said.

Later all the delegates were taken for a short excursion to the Kremlin following which President Putin invited them over for lunch.

“We had a brief discussion with the President and I told him about what all we have been doing to promote Russian language. It was indeed a great honour,” said a pleased Prof. Kumar.

The Fund, he said, has promised to organise more such frequent interactions and has invited concrete proposals and projects for strengthening the teaching of Russian language and literature.

The recent elections to the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union had their share of controversies.

The biggest, arguably, was the disruption of the presidential debate by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad activists who allegedly went on a rampage in protest against “offensive remarks” made by a candidate about Lord Ram.

The ransacking had led to some tension on the campus with rumours afloat that the elections could be postponed. There were murmurs of discontent in the student community over the way the entire event was handled.

Several JNUites believe that the situation went out of hand because of “inefficiency” of the election committee -- comprising students since JNUSU elections are organised by them -- that was “fairly inexperienced” and could not check the situation on time. “Aggression is very common during the presidential debate and it happens all the time. But this time the situation worsened because the election committee members could not control it in time. There was enough time for them to swing into action, but since most of them are first-timers, barring a couple of members, they could not deal with it and the debate had to end abruptly,” said one senior student.

- Parul Sharma

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