Over 500 schoolchildren from various regions of Russia gathered in Moscow at the BRICS Festival. The participants learnt about the culture, languages and traditions of the BRICS countries, as well as about the activities of group’s countries. The event was combined with an open day at the faculty of pre-university education of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University).

Igor Putintsev, Vice-Rector for language and pre-university education, welcomed the students. He emphasised that the training of international specialists who speak the languages of the BRICS countries plays a key role in strengthening international ties.

Anna Lisina, Editor-in-Chief of the TV BRICS news portal, was a special guest of the festival. She spoke about the peculiarities of the multilingual portal’s editorial work, presented the BRICS Bloggers Team and BRICS View international media network’s projects to the students, and introduced the festival guests to the principles of TV BRICS information exchange with foreign partners. She also conducted a quiz for pupils on the topic “Creating scripts for video clips with the help of artificial intelligence”.

Nikita Molchakov, Dean of the International Law Faculty of MGIMO University, also spoke at the event and shared the experience of the IX BRICS Legal Forum.

“Each BRICS initiative has its own driver country. […] Even the BRICS Legal Forum, despite the fact that there are ten countries, has three drivers that have been supporting this movement for nine years: these are Russia, India and Brazil. These are the three drivers of the legal movement within BRICS,” he explained.

Head of the student community Aleksander Khanarov spoke about the work of the first international student platform for generating ideas of BRICS countries – BRICS Project Lab, while Maria Starikova, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Indo-Iranian and African Languages, outlined the peculiarities of teaching Hindi, which is spoken by almost 500 million people.

“The government is actively promoting Hindi and other local languages. There are a total of 22 official languages in India, and Hindi is attracting huge interest not only in our country but all over the world,” she said.

The creative part of the programme included performances by MGIMO University students. They performed a song in Chinese, Arabic dance “Dabke” and presented a linguo-country study in Portuguese. A quiz on the history and activities of BRICS was also organised for the festival participants. The winners received memorable gifts.

In addition, the open day of the faculty of pre-university education presented study programmes.

The festival was organised by the Centre for Work with Schools of MGIMO and the TV BRICS International Media Network. The event is implemented within the framework of the project “EastTalk MGIMO: Introduction to Oriental Studies for Schoolchildren” with the support of the state programme “Priority 2030”, aimed at creating more than 100 progressive modern universities in Russia by 2030. 

Photo: MGIMO University