Douglas McDonald

Recipient of a Prime Minister’s Endeavour Award
Host university: National Law School of India University in Bangalore

Why did you choose to study at the National Law School of the India University?
The National Law School’s students do extremely well in the national admission test for law schools.  It has an extremely distinguished alumni pool.  A lot of the most exciting young Indian legal scholars went to the Indian Law School and it has an extremely good reputation and so I thought that is the place to go.
 
I’m incredibly glad that I went to the National Law School, because even with those high expectations, the students were incredibly intelligent and incredibly engaging and, on top of that, profoundly nice to me and extremely willing to help me fit in.  The teaching was very good and the alumni network have been extremely useful and extremely engaging.
 
So you feel, as a result of this, that you’ve established a professional network?
Yes, I’ve made a lot of very good friends, made a lot of very good contacts and I feel incredibly close to the National Law School and I feel incredibly proud to have been there.  I’m sure that as the years go by, I’ll be even more glad that I spent time there.
 
What did you like most about Bangalore and India?
I came to love Bangalore more and more for its own qualities. It’s a city with some beautiful gardens, with beautiful architecture. It’s a peaceful city with a lovely climate and it’s just a profoundly enjoyable city to live in because there’s a lot of things to do, there’s a good nightlife, there’s comedy events, there’s always political or discussion events on.
 
As for India as a whole, it is an extremely diverse, lively, complicated country.  I find it incredibly fascinating the way that its constituent cultures deal with each other, the intermingling between those cultures and the fact that the country is capable, under certain conditions, of great things.  The fact that India, an incredibly poor, diverse, fractious country is democratic, the fact that it can peacefully vote out rulers and consistently demand more from its politicians is, to me, one of the most inspiring things in the world.
 
Was it easy to settle into student life in Bangalore?
There were no language barriers and people were generally incredibly willing to get to know me and help me out. Over time, I made really good friends. I did everything I could to engage with people: we went to see movies together… Harry Potter helped a lot. The only kid in my class of 80 people who hadn’t seen or read Harry Potter was the American exchange student and knowing a lot about Harry Potter and the fact that it’s easier to do an Alan Rickman impression with an Australian accent than with an Indian accent… Harry Potter and these shared cultural references helped me get along, helped me integrate and eventually helped me make some really good friends.
 
How do you feel that, in general, this scholarship helps students to build links between India and Australia and build that relationship of understanding?
I never would have done it without the scholarship. I never would have been able to afford it, and I think without the help from my Endeavour case manager, it would have been a lot harder. Endeavour made everything possible. There is a lot of desire amongst students to learn more about other legal systems, to see what they can learn about Australia by contrast with other legal systems, and what lessons we can draw, but Endeavour is absolutely necessary as a way of turning that will into a reality.
 
The whole experience was immeasurably elevated by doing the internship and getting to apply what I’d learnt in the course.