It isn’t every day you see a Duke billboard on Tansen Marg in downtown New Delhi:

Billboard in front of FICCI building, New Delhi

But today was Duke day at FICCI featuring President Brodhead’s appearance before more than 50 leading educators, journalists and business executives. FICCI is India’s oldest and largest business organization, with a membership of more than 1,500 individual corporations and 500 chambers of commerce. Founded in 1927 at the urging of Mahatma Gandhi, FICCI has a longstanding role in promoting higher education in India. Recent speakers have included the presidents of Stanford and Harvard, as well as the chancellor of Oxford, and the president of Yale is scheduled to visit to next month.

FICCI also has a decidedly Blue Devil tinge to it: the secretary general, Amit Mitra, received his master’s and Ph.D. in economics from Duke in the late 1970’s (and was even sporting a Fuqua School of Business tie today) and several Duke alumni and parents are members of the prestigious group. Fuqua alumnus Shivender Singh, CEO of Fortis Healthcare Limited and chairman of the FICCI health group, introduced President Brodhead for remarks and what turned out to be a spirited question and answer session:

(l to r) Amit Mitra, Richard Brodhead, Shivender Singh

The guests included academic leaders from business, engineering and medical schools, journalists, government officials and business leaders, and their questions reflected their intense fascination with, and appreciation for, American higher education. India’s college and university system, while large in terms of enrollment, is still evolving and is under constant pressure for funding. The participants in the roundtable were curious about American — and Duke — answers to issues such as improving primary and secondary opportunities for the least advantaged students, addressing “reservations,” the system of quotas in India that ensures that all social and economic groups are represented at the nation’s universities, encouraging civic engagement through programs like DukeEngage, distance learning, and Duke’s interest in exploring biomedical research opportunities with Indian medical schools.

In all, a spirited conversation — dialogue, really — which could have gone on much longer than the 90 minutes allotted to it.

Before concluding the meeting, Dr. Mitra (pictured here with Fuqua Associate Dean Gordon Soenksen):

reminisced about his former economics professors and told an interesting and amusing story about the visit of his mother’s guru, a long haired and bearded physicist, to the Duke Chapel. I can’t begin to do that one justice, except to say the crowd loved it.