assassination of US President John Kennedy in Dallas had reached us in Mumbai. Of course according to the US timing, it was 22 November. That also happened to be a day when four officers of the Indian army had died in a tragic plane crash.’ During this posting Joshi also had a chance to go to France for seven months between 20 August 1967 and 30 March 1968 for the study of French Postal System. He went on a scholarship given by the French Government. It is not clear from the papers available whether he went alone or with his family. He spent first fourteen weeks just to study French language. There were 42 trainees in his batch from 21 countries. Before that, while in Delhi, Joshi used to go to the evening classes to learn French at an institute called School of Foreign Languages which was run by the Defence Ministry. But despite going there almost for a year his knowledge of French was minimal. But in those fourteen weeks in France he mastered that language and never again had any difficulty in expressing his thoughts in French. That was of immense help to him in future. According to Joshi the reason for the effectiveness of Course in France was the audio-visual system they used. In a way, Alliance Française ran over twenty such French teaching institutes in India including one in Delhi. They too had this sophisticated audiovisual system for teaching French. But instead of using their service, the Government used its own institute which was very poor in giving training as Joshi had discovered. Going to such useless training programmes was a colossal waste of government money and precious time of the learners. However, no one bothered about it, Joshi lamented. After that training Joshi spent the remaining four months in France working in the Post Offices studying their systems in four particular areas; Mechanization of Sorting, Mechanization of Window Operations, Working of Exchange Offices and 44
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Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
