Yusuf Hamied (right) with Master of Christ’s College Frank Kelly (second from right) and other friends

London, Dec. 26: A 14-member cricket team representing Cambridge University is being flown to India by Yusuf Hamied, chairman of Indian pharmaceutical company Cipla, to coincide with a visit by the university’s vice-chancellor, Alison Richard.

Asked to explain his expansive and expensive gesture, Hamied laughed and said: “Chalta hai, yaar!”

Who will he support as Cambridge plays a number of matches, including one against Delhi University and another against Bombay Gymkhana? Hamied, who was admitted to Christ’s College in 1954, got a first in natural sciences and stayed on to do a PhD, responded immediately: “Cambridge, of course.”

The team, which has been practising hard at the indoor nets at Fenner’s, is led by Akbar Ansari and includes two players of Indian origin, Anand Ashok and Ananya Sen.

“It’s a strong side,” promised Ansari, who is of Pakistani origin.

Richard, making her third and final visit to India as vice-chancellor, is relying on the support of alumni such as Hamied to strengthen the bonds between Cambridge and India.

During her trip from January 7-17, which begins, as before, in Calcutta and takes in Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and, for the first time, Pune, she will have a meeting with Sonia Gandhi.

It will bring back memories, both happy and sad, for Sonia who met her late husband, Rajiv Gandhi, while she was a student at a language school in Cambridge and he was at Trinity College reading natural sciences.

Their son, Rahul, later spent a short period doing an MPhil at Trinity, where his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, had once been an undergraduate.

Richard is keen, though, to modernise India’s relationship with Cambridge. “It is not a question of what Cambridge can do for India or what India can do for Cambridge — it’s what India and Cambridge can do together,” her spokesperson said.

Exchange of scholars and collaboration between Cambridge and Indian universities in many disciplines are among the aims.

After a seven-year stint as the 344th vice-chancellor of Cambridge but the first woman to hold the post full time in the 800-year history of the university, Richard is stepping down on October 1,2010.

Her successor has been picked. He is Leszek Borysiewicz, the chief executive of the Medical Research Council, which has had links with no fewer than 29 Nobel Prize winners,including one of the 2009 chemistry Nobel laureates, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.

It is not yet clear whether links can be developed between Cambridge and Presidency College in Calcutta which has over many decades offered its best and brightest to the former.

Among them Amartya Sen, who just managed to squeeze into Trinity and later became its Master, the first Indian to become head of an Oxbridge College.

Richard’s delegation includes Michael ’Sullivan, director of the Cambridge and Commonwealth Trust which provides financial assistance to overseas students at Cambridge. Sandra Dawson, deputy vice-chancellor, who chairs the Cambridge-India Partnership, is also coming.

She has exchanged correspondence with Mamata Banerjee’s office after the Trinamul Congress chief expressed a desire to visit Cambridge. She has been told she can participate in a round table discussion.