Karnataka - Bangalore   

Riding high on Rhodes scholarship

Arghya Sengupta

BANGALORE: Arghya Sengupta, a 23-year-old student from National Law School of Indian University (NLSIU), is currently riding high on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University.

“It is all about being an all-rounder,” he says. This be-spectacled youngman tops his class every year but he is nowhere close to being a nerd. Besides being an excellent orator and quizzer, he is also a poet. His classnotes which are like reference manuals for his classmates are interspersed with romantic Bengali poetry. He smiles mischievously when asked about what he did to celebrate his achievement and asks me to keep it off the record. “My parents are ecstatic, and happier than I can ever be,” he adds with a smile. His friends testify that he is the “funnest” guy on the floor and has an excellent sense of humour.

Arghya, who is one of the five students to be awarded the prestigious Rhodes scholarship this year, will be pursuing his masters in Law and wants to specialise in Public International Law.

Unlike most students who find a passage out of India, he is clear that he will return to India. He talks with great passion about what attracts him to International law. “The one thing that struck a chord in me is the whole issue of India’s negotiations with the WTO. I found that we were often on the losing side due to the lack of legal expertise,” he says. He says that he would like to bridge that gap and that would be his way of paying back to the country.

Last year, the number of Indians selected for the scholarship decreased from six to five. Students, who apply for the Rhodes scholarship, need to write a “Statement Of Purpose” (SOP) and appear for interviews. The process is only an evaluation of your academic records and personality. He says he was quizzed on current events, and being up-to-date matters. Asked about his view on the SEZ policy, he had his theories well in place. As a Bengali my ideologies may differ but as a law student I look at it from the policy-maker’s point of view, he says.

He says he wants to come back to India and is open to working with the Government as a policy-maker. While working with his professor on the Office of Profit Bill, when the Government had asked NLSIU to prepare a report, he discovered his passion for policy- making. “There is something extremely logical about law, which I think influences my approach to everything in life,” he says.

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