00873nam a22001097a 4500008004100000100002500041245006100066260001800127300002300145520057700168773001800745211227b           ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d  aKarunakaran, Kalpana  a An unlikely friendship links the Volga and the Vaigai    aThe Caravan    aJuly, 2021: p.8-10  aOn 19 November 2020, the Indian embassy in Russia announced that Alexander Dubiansky, a professor of Tamil studies at Moscow State University, had died of COVID-19 at the age of 79. Dubiansky was a reputed scholar of the Tamil language and its literature, and the news of his death led to an outpouring of grief through social-media posts by writers, scholars and leaders across the political spectrum in Tamil Nadu. He was remembered as “an adopted son of Mother Tamil,” whose devotion to the language had “linked the Volga and the Vaigai rivers.” – Reproduced   aThe Caravan