On January 18,
actor Bala Kumar had uploaded a video message for over eighty thousand of his followers on Facebook. He had some happy news to share. According to the actor, popular for his roles in various Tamil and Malayalam film and philanthropic work, he was awarded the Doctor of Humane Letters by The Royal American University and was apparently the first South Indian to be awarded such an honour by a foreign university.
Owing to COVID, the convocation wasn t held in Delaware, where the university was apparently headquartered, says Bala in the video. However, since the video was released, there has been a lot of hue and cry about the legitimacy of the university by academics across Kerala. A lot of them were further irked by the prefix Dr added to Bala s name in a poster for a college event, where he was felicitated.