Legal translations, Business and Commercial Translations, Technical Translations, Literary Translations.

I have a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, in which I topped the First Class honours list and was awarded the Gold Medal of the University. The curriculum was broad and diverse and liberal, dealing with most of the major genres and movements in European and American literature, such as the oral and the literary epic, neo-classicism, the Enlightenment and the 20th Century novel. Many of the faculty members had graduated from the University of Indiana, Bloomington, and were well-versed in the critical and theoretical trends of the day. There was, in my view, an excessive reliance on Marxist hermeneutics (Lukacs, Benjamin, Goldman, but also Jameson, Anderson and Raymond Williams). In any case, there was an initiation into theory that was not insubstantial.

I was, at the same time, taking courses in French language and civilisation at the Alliance Francaise de Calcutta, where I made extensive use of the library to acquaint myself with mainly 19th and 20th century French poets and novelists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Artaud, Beckett and the playwrights of the absurd, the Dada and Surrealism).

In 1984, I went to the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, to do a Masters in French. At the end of the year, I was awarded a scholarship by the French government to go to France and work towards a doctorate on a French literary topic.

I was fortunate in being able to enroll at the Universite de Paris VII, one of the finest literature faculties in the world and one of the principal centers of post-structuralist literary thinking. Madame Julia Kristeva was kind enough to take me under her wing and guide me in my work over the next six years. From 1985 to 1991, I was exposed to most of the major currents in literary theory, to several branches of the human sciences, including psychoanalysis, as well as to the philosophies of Hegel, Kant, Heidegger and Michel Foucault. I successfully defended my thesis in 1991 and was given a Mention Tres Bien. I have a relatively easy command over the French academic and intellectual idiom.

I have an earlier qualification in Commerce from the University of Bombay, which has been of little use to me. I have supplemented that with a certificate in commercial French from the Chamber of Commerce in Paris awarded through the Alliance Francaise.

My work experience has been diverse.

I have worked frequently as a translator, for Indian and French companies