Gurukul Up Close and Personal

(Written for British Council's Website to promote the Chevening Gurukul Programme)

Three months, twelve bright young professionals from diverse backgrounds, numerous lectures, debates and discussions, study tours, presentations and all this in a setting like the heart of the city of London at an institute called London School of Economics and Political Science. This was meant to be different. Enough ingredients for story telling J Let me tell a couple today since I was privileged to be one of the twelve chosen ones in the year 2005.

Scala House where we were put up was just 20 minutes walking distance (and fifteen minutes sprint distance – as some of the late risers told us) from LSE. We were shacked up two to a service apartment plush with every gadget for good living. But the very first weekend we arrived there we realized that some adjustments had to be made. Not so much with Scala House but with ourselves. Here we were set in our professional lives for ten years at least, in top positions where people listened to what we said, set in our family lives with husbands, wives and kids who accommodated our various needs, and now we thrown back again into the flurry and tentativeness of a college-hostel lives where the rules of community living had to be negotiated once again. It’s not easy to live with eleven other bright people who are as staunch in their beliefs as you are – and these beliefs sometimes being diametrically opposite to yours, as passionate about what they do and as obstinate about doing things their way. Be it the classroom or the kitchen one had to take a step back and give the other room. There were scuffles, verbal and emotional, debates which left some bleeding and some seething, wars which sometimes ended with glasses of beer at the local pub and some that went on for days in the classrooms. Yet towards the end of the programme one felt one has come a long way in understanding, coming closer to each other and to each others views. One made allies, one made friends, one learnt to speak in another’s language, swim in another’s paradigm – mostly one learnt how important it is to unlearn one’s ways mid career, mid job, mid life. How important it is to pause and breathe.

If my first story is personal, the second is about the immense exposure the course provides to British and in a sense European ways of life, business, politics, trade, social reforms, education, health, culture – a whole lot of which almost focuses on global trends and practices. Most of the faculty was brilliant and they came from all walks of life – there were bureaucrats, politicians, academics, business professionals, entrepreneurs, bilateral agency workers, all types. And this exposure was not just limited to classrooms but taken out into the field where study tours not only in London but across cities like Berlin, Geneva, Toulouse, Edinburgh and Brussels gave a very practical, hands-on experience on some of these issues. The thesis we were to do took us further to network with organizations and institutions in London. And then there were the public lectures at LSE. Any dignitary from anywhere in the world who comes to London certainly takes the time to visit LSE and deliver a lecture there. And these lectures deliver the world in a bowl in front of you. The exposure does not stop with academics either. Being in the heart of London has other advantages. The theatre, the films, the museums, the opera and dance houses, the clubs, the pubs, the music and the cuisine – London is truly international. From the popular mainstream to the marginal fringes, every type of cultural expression is performed and celebrated.

My last story is about what happens when the course gets over. Apart from the friends one has made and the network one has built, British Council is very keen on maintaining a relationship with the scholars. There are city chapters of scholars one might join, there are internet communities and also now a Gurukul Foundation in the making. One can be an active part of all of this. However, I must say one thing that is a specific learning from the course and thereafter. You get as much as you give. There are plenty of opportunities that are created in front of you but you must actively choose those and work with those to make this experience worthwhile and long-lasting. Or else it will be what most other courses are – just another flowery credential in your resume.