The Jawaharlal Nehru University administration seems to be all geared up to pull out a leaf from the Hindu scripture Bhagwad Gita and impart a few lessons from it on how to tackle the coronavirus pandemic that has taken the entire country by storm.
The university just completed conducting lessons on the Ramayana and now it is all set to draw lessons from the Bhagwad Gita on handling the COVID-19 pandemic. A lecture will be held in order to take the cause further through a webinar in which Padma Shri Award Winning professor Subhash Kak from the Oklahoma State University, USA will be speaking. It is to be noted that professor Subhash Kak is also a member of the Prime Minister’s Science and Technology, and Innovation Advisory Council since 2018.
The lecture by professor Subhash Kak will be held on May 7 from 6-7PM. This lecture is being coordinated by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee School of Management and Entrepreneurship and Centre for Media Studies, JNU. The registration for the program is open and those interested would have to register themselves though the Zoom app.
JNU administration has been organising many such lectures in order to “generate awareness against the coronavirus.” The line-up includes ‘Extracting cream out of corona crisis- Position the India of future’ by director, Institute of Advanced Science, Dartmouth, USA.
This lecture is being organised by the Special Centre for Molecular Medicine, JNU along with lectures on India’s challenges and response to the COVID-19 crisis. The lectures that the university administration had organised on the Ramayana in recent days had received heavy criticism and opposition. The university vice-vice-chancellor had responded to the opposition and said in an interview to the ANI, “ Mahatma Gandhi emphasised how Lord Rama taught us to uphold, truth, justice, equality and equanimity even in an adverse situation. When we are fighting COVID we thought there are great lessons to learn from Ramayana to strengthen ourselves. I see no reason why anybody should oppose it.”
JNU like most other academic institutions throughout the country is closed at present and exams are proposed in a digital mode. Some centres and apartments have even begun conducting examinations online. JNU has in fact become the first university to conduct digital exams. The university informed in an official statement that more than 800 students were presently residing in the campus.
