
Premiere technical and B-schools in the US are inviting Lalu to give lectures on their campus.
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. 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 interact with Lalu. Students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be arriving on March 26 for a lecture. "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. Earlier, Harvard Business School and HEC Management School, France, had come to India to study Lalu's experiment with the Indian railways. 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. The company, which was worth $13 billion was worth hundreds of billions when Welch retired. 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. The students also asked him why he could not turn around Bihar in the 15-year RJD rule of the state. "Bihar has no potential. Per capita income is low, there are constant floods. But the Railways is like an empire. It has huge potential," was Lalu's reply then. It remains to be seen what new challenges the US students have in store for him now.
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