The Times of India
(For the uninitiated, Lalu Prasad Yadav, India's Minister for Railways, is the antithesis of the "urban English-educated Indian" - he can barely speak English and wears his country bumpkin persona like a badge of honor)
For Lalu, it is America calling
MANDVI SHARMA [ 13 Mar, 2007 2106hrs IST TIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
Premiere technical and B-schools in the US are inviting Lalu to give lectures. What makes Lalu such a hit in Amreeka?
There is news for those who thought that Lalu reached the pinnacle of his academic career when students from Harvard and Wharton came to listen to the Railway Minister.
Actually, America's love affair with Lalu has just started. There is a slew of B-schools who want Lalu to speak on their campuses and there are others who are coming here to listen to the man himself.
A look at the diary of the Railway Minister sheds some light: About 35 student from the University of Texas and 20 students from the University of Virginia are coming to India on March 16 to have an interaction with Lalu. Students from Massachusetts Institute Of Technology (MIT) will be arriving on March 26 for a lecture.
And then, there are invitations from different American Universities for Lalu to go there and conduct a 'turn around' seminar. "He has been invited by Harvard Business School on April 18, Stanford University on April 14 and University of Chicago on April 10. Many other American Universities have also extended invitations.
They want to discuss the strategies that he applied in the functioning of the Indian Railways," says Sudhir Kumar, OSD to Lalu.
The students from Wharton and Harvard, who had visited earlier, compared Lalu to Jack Welch, the man who turned around the fortunes of General Electric. And, believe it or faint, Lalu is actually being seen as Welch's new-age version.
During his interaction with Wharton and Harvard students, Lalu chose to call himself Guruji and explained to the students in Hindi how he had broken the western myth that an unprofitable enterprise should be privatised and its employees downsized.
Lalu referred to the students as "achcha bachcha log" (good kids) and urged them to be honest and hard-working during the hour-long lecture. Lalu has also given management gyan (knowledge) to IIM Ahmedabad and Bangalore students.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges