Governance
of the Maison de l'Inde

Tell us about your background and how you came to join the Cité internationale.

A large part of my life over the past forty years has been closely connected to the Cité internationale, to the point where I feel I have never really been separated from it. After training as a veterinarian in Bengaluru, India, I joined the Institut Pasteur in Paris to pursue a PhD in immunology, while living at the Maison de l’Inde.

After a postdoctoral stay in the United States, I joined the CNRS in 1990 as a researcher and later led a team working on immunotherapy. Several of my students also stayed at the Maison de l’Inde. I served on the Foundation’s Board of Directors in 2013 and 2014.

From 2015 to 2025, I headed the CNRS office in New Delhi, within the French Embassy, where I worked to develop scientific cooperation between India, France and the European Union.

In your opinion, what makes the Cité internationale a unique campus in the world?

Coming from India, where every neighbourhood, every city and every region reflects a great diversity of cultures, languages and traditions, living alongside people from different backgrounds has always felt natural to me. Joining the community of residents at the Cité internationale broadened this horizon even further, allowing me to interact with students from virtually every corner of the world.

The Cité internationale has been, and will always remain, a unique place where values of openness to diversity, tolerance and respect for others are experienced and passed on — values that seem more essential than ever in the sensitive times we are living through today.

If you had to sum up the Cité internationale in one word, which would you choose and why?

If I had to choose a single word to describe the Cité internationale, or to express what it represents to me, it would be “harmony”. Harmony begins as soon as you enter the campus: between its remarkable architecture and its gardens, between greenery and colour, between nature and what human beings have built there. Nothing dominates; everything seems to find its place naturally. This harmony continues when you enter one of its houses, each with its own character and identity, yet all sharing the same spirit of hospitality and the same sense of belonging.

At the Cité internationale, we also grow in harmony with the opportunities around us – academically, intellectually, culturally and personally. It offers an environment in which academic achievement can flourish in close connection with nature and with a particularly vibrant international community.

And perhaps above all, the Cité internationale enables everyone to find their own balance: to nurture their intellectual interests, discover new cultures, develop their artistic or sporting passions, and simply flourish as an individual.

That, for me, is what makes the Cité internationale so unique: it brings differences together without erasing them, and creates harmony without requiring uniformity.