These enthusiastic exclamations come from Shinjini Bhattacharjee and Rupsa Ghosh, two bright MPhil students in Geography from Delhi University (DU) who have spent two months in Lund from mid-November 2015 as exchange students through the Linnaeus Palme collaboration programme between DU and the Department of Gender Studies at Lund University.



Shinjini and Rupsa came to visit SASNET for an interview (photo to the right) a few days before they reluctantly had to return to India, and here they met another two Indian students butin the field of Journalism, Anju and Parvathy from University of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram, just having arrived in Lund through another Linnaeus Palme collaboration project between their department at University of Kerala and the Dept. of Communication and Media (KOM) at Lund University. Better ambasssadors for the beneficial effects of this great Swedish mobility programme are difficult to find.



Anju and Parvathy were equally happy to be in Lund, and they had already been introduced to SASNET and its student organisation SASA, and had attended the Fika without borders event focusing on Bhutan a week before.



They had been nicely introduced in the activities at KOM not only by the department faculty including Andreas Mattsson and other eminent researchers, but also by Prof. Harikumar (photo to the right) from their Indian home university, an experienced media researcher who has been visiting Lund before. He now stays for a month at LU as part of the same collaboration programme as Anju and Parvathy, who especially look forward to learn from the practical training in Journalism offered by Lund University.



SASNET has been instrumental in both these ongoing Linnaeus Palme programmes, as well as two other India related programmes that Lund University has managed to get funding for – between the School of Social Work and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai, India; and between the Law and Vulnerabilities research programme, Faculty of Law, Lund University and TISS.



Shinjini and Rupsa had become extremely fond of the Lund atmosphere, even though they stayed in the city during ”the darkest and most depressing time of the year” – so people had told them, but the Indian students totally disagree. And during Christmas time, which in Sweden is very much a family affair, they took the chance to visit Rupsa’s sister in Munich, and from there travel in four European countries, besides Germany, also Austria, Hungary and Slovakia.

At Lund University they joined the Gender Studies Masters Programme and attended a number of courses, and during the first part of their stay in Lund they were accompanied by Dr. Anindita Datta from Delhi University, who is coordinating the Linnaeus Palme programme together with Professor Helle Rydström at Lund University.

Lars Eklund