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TRIP TO REMEMBER A group of diaspora youth visits India on an internship and is emotionally awed by all that the nation can offer in terms of knowledge, beauty and human resources EMPIRE BUREAU
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YOUTH POWER: Members of the youth diaspora seen with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Mrs Gursharan Kaur
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At a media meet in New Delhi, it was heartening to see a young man from Malaysia with Indian roots, fascinated by India, even more fascinated after an interaction with its Prime Minister. A young lady of Indian origin from South Africa deeply impressed by India’s progress, and touched by its beauty. A youth group drawn from among the Indian diaspora wanting to revisit a land their ancestors left many years ago.
It was a group of 25 young men and women; vibrant, and at the end of its four-week stay in India, highly emotional. It was a group that came, saw, and returned impressed, with a promise to come back to breathe the air of India again. Drawn from nine nations, the group was in India between May 15 and June 12. It was based in New Delhi and in the rural areas of a pleasantly cool Himachal
Pradesh. Little wonder they liked the air they breathed.
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A SPEECH TO REMEMBER: The young men and women are impressed by Dr Singh’s fountain of knowledge |
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What exactly was this group doing in India? It was in India thanks to the annual Internship Programme for Diaspora Youth
(IPDY), a systematic effort at bringing the young diaspora closer to India made by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, specifically by a team led by Malay
Mishra, Joint Secretary (Diaspora Services Division). The event was termed Know India Programme and was held in conjunction with the Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan
(NYKS).
According to Mishra, the participants were exposed not just to various aspects of Indian culture, adventure sports and rural lifestyles, they were also able to interact with the youth drawn from various parts of India through a national integration camp. “It created a sense of belonging,” a clearly satisfied Mishra told INDIA EMPIRE.
And what did the participants go through? Dipti from the
U.A.E. felt a sense of bonding so deep that she knew she had much to offer the India of the future, and, in turn, India had much to offer her. Kamala Guganeswaran from Malaysia was all for setting up a similar exchange programme between Malaysia and India. There were the likes of Sudisha Naidu from South Africa for whom the experience of touching base with the land of her ancestors was a “great learning curve.” Krishna Maroo from the United Kingdom emphasised that the experience among the people of India, in this case those of Himachal
Pradesh, was something that every NRI-PIO could do with. After all, it did create a deep sense of oneness with one’s roots.
The high-point of their Delhi stay was the interaction with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It didn’t Dr. Singh long to make a lasting impression on the minds of the young men and women. He described the young Indian diaspora as a “knowledge bank.” He struck an emotional chord, saying he was proud of the achievements of PIOs. The PM told his keen audience that the more the diaspora drew closer to its motherland, the more India would grow. The PM said it’d be a win-win situation—his message was not lost on his young diaspora audience.
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June 2006
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