As part of their tour of India to strengthen India-German bonds and widen their own cultural horizon, a group of 50 students from five schools in Germany visited Chandigarh on Tuesday, a programme organiser said.
The exchange programme is associated with the 12-year-old Indo-German School Partnership, said well known German language writer and cultural educationist Rajvinder Singh, a Kapurthala-born writer based in Berlin since 1980.
"Globalisation has not only enhanced international and inter-cultural mobility, it has, in fact, made the dream of educational and communitarian dynamism of networking among nations a reality. Consequently, we do not only talk about others today, but also primarily talk to each other," Rajvinder Singh, who accompanied the visiting students, told IANS.
Recognising the networking of educational communities as an asset to cultural understanding and global amity, he began to hold creative writing workshops on Indian and German themes in schools to make German students acquainted with and aware of the multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual fabric of India.
The exchange programme was later expanded to school partnerships exchange when Rajvinder Singh led a group of students and teachers of Bayreuther Strasse in Wuppertal to Delhi's Springdales School.
It was then expanded to Delhi Public Schools and soon involved more than a hundred schools throughout India when the coordination was taken over by the Goethe Institute, whose branches in India are called Max-Mueller Bhawan, named after German Indologist Max Mueller.
Since 2014, when Rajvinder Singh accompanied the then German Foreign Minister Dr Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as member of his delegation, this programme has now been extended to the Indian Kendriya Vidyalayas.
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This exchange has certainly enhanced the visibility of Indian culture in Germany.
"It is the cultural dialogue and all that goes with it, such as education, that expands the mental horizon of students of both countries that forms the main impetus of this exchange," Singh said.
The German students later travelled to Himachal Pradesh, from where they would go to Uttarakhand.
--IANS
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