Inauguration of the academic activities of the EMS Academy

Thiruvananthapuram, Nov. 11, 2001: Noted intellectual Noam Chomsky inaugurated the academic activities of the EMS Academy in Thiruvananthapuram. M.A. Baby, Central Committee member of the CPI(M), and Dr. K.N. Panikkar, historian and Vice-Chancellor of the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady also present in the occasion.

Chomsky's lecture, titled 'Globalisation and Human Survival: The Challenges after September 11', on November 11 provided an exciting start to the activities of the EMS Academy.

The Academy, to be developed as an alternative centre for learning and research, has been instituted in the memory of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, one of the greatest intellectuals of Kerala and India. Many walked several kilometres to attend the event. Members of the audience, a large number of whom failed to find seats inside the hall, heard him in rapt attention throughout the one-and-a-half-hour speech.

Later, one of the first questions that Chomsky fielded, soon after he delightfully acknowledged autograph hunters, was on "what he would have done after the September 11 attacks, had he been the President of the United States." Chomsky said: "Exactly the same thing as President George Bush. It is an institutional reaction and had I been the President, the reaction would have been the same." Chomsky added that it only showed that what need to be changed are institutions, not individuals.