New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has chopped the dishhevelled beard he grew during his recently-concluded cross-country march as recent photos swirled of him giving a lecture at UK’s Cambridge University Tuesday evening.
Gandhi’s dapper look — he also cut his hair and suited up — ignited much interest as glimpses from the event were circulated by Congress leaders. It also put to rest much speculation about when the Congress leader would cut his Karl Marx-esque beard he’d grown while walking from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. While the parallel with Marx was obvious, BJP leaders like Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had also compared the beard to that of Saddam Hussain.
In pictures from the talk, one could see that Rahul’s beard was trimmed to a “corporate” size. He’s on a week-long visit to UK and as per sources, left for the country right after the Congress Plenary session ended in Raipur on Sunday. Apart from the talk at the Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS), Gandhi is also slated to meet members of the Indian diaspora in UK in an event organised by the Indian Overseas Congress on 5 March.
This is the second time that Rahul has spoken at Cambridge within a year — Tuesday’s the talk was titled ‘Learning To Listen In the 21st Century”.
According to a statement issued by Cambridge, Rahul, who’s said to be a Fellow at CJBS, said in the closed-door address that people around the world “need to find a way of listening compassionately to new concerns in a 21st century that has been transformed by the shift of production away from democratic countries and toward China”.
“The art of listening when done consistently and diligently is “very powerful”, Rahul said.
As per Cambridge, his talk was divided into 3 broad parts — the first outlined his Bharat Jodo Yatra, the second looked at the “divergent perspectives” of US and China since World War II and the collapse of the USSR, and the third was on the “imperative for a global conversation”.
“He knitted the themes together in a call for a new type of receptiveness to various viewpoints – explaining that a yatra is a journey or pilgrimage in which people shut themselves down so they can listen to others,” the Cambridge statement read.