A day at Riau University

One of my team member, Kasman Arifin, is doctorate in economics and also visiting faculty in Riau University. One day he told me he is planning to invite me to university to speak on something. I thought he is not serious & accepted his invitation.

Few days later, to my surprise, I received a letter from University of Riau, inviting me to be a guest speaker on an event organized by Economics Faculty English Club. I had to speak on subject “English is essential for job seekers”.


I got little nervous. Although I did training in JDE many times for number of people, this is something different. I am going to speak in front of large crowd, in a stage, without help from PowerPoint slides. When I do JDE training, half of my power comes from these slides. Apart from this, there was no time for preparation, since I got this invitation just a day before the event.


Kasman informed me there would be around 50 students. I just prepared a chit with the points which I need to speak & kept in my pocket. Saturday morning, Kasman came to pick me up. Vrush & Adi wished me luck, as if I was going to appear for some exam.


Kasman has a nice car. I complimented him on having such a posh car. He said it valued Rupiah 850 million. That’s huge money (around 42 lakh Indian Rupees). We went to his house first to pick up his son. I saw a very old model of Land Rover parked in his garage. Kasman said he bought it in 1984 & it is still working fine. Two expensive cars..Kasman must be very rich guy. His father worked for Indonesian Army.


It took almost an hour for us to reach the University campus. The Campus was huge, with lot of greenery inside. A group of students greeted us with smile. For most of them, I was the first Indian they met personally, so naturally they showed lot of interest on India, Bollywood & especially Shah Rukh Khan.



I think I did a good job on the stage. I speak for almost one and half hour on the subject, without looking at my chit. I was successful keeping the students engaged till the end. There was a question – answer session after the speech. That was really a interesting discussion. Some students had the opinion that they don’t need to learn English to get a job in Indonesia. They defended their statement saying all the popular books, magazines, movies etc are translated to Bahasa Indonesia so they don’t need to learn English at all. I was able to convince them that now world is a global village & they have to compete with people outside Indonesia, not just within Indonesia. English is the global language & they have to master it to achieve this.




The organizers rewarded me with a token. We took some photographs & students dropped me to the camp. It was a memorable event, thanks to Pak Kasman.