Danke! German students to stay for Diwali

Tribune News Service        

Chandigarh, October 17 

Under the Indo-German School Partnerships, a contingent of 23 German students visited Chandigarh today. The students, most of them are pursuing high secondary education, are from Krefeld, Solingen and Wuppertal, three cities of Northrhine-Westphalian state of Germany. 

The students will go to Barog, Himachal Pradesh, from here and then to Shimla. They will be in Dehradun for Diwali. The programme is of two weeks. The students will spend one week with an Indian family. 

Rajvinder Singh, a Kapurthala-born writer based in Berlin since 1980, is the initiator and felicitator of this school-level exchange. 

He said, “Globalisation has not only enhanced international and inter-cultural mobility on our planet, but has in fact made the dream of educational and communitarian dynamism of networking among nations a reality. Consequently, we do not only talk about the other today, but also and primarily talk to each other.”

He had started giving creative writing workshops on Indo-German themes in schools to make the German students acquainted with and aware of the multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual fabric of India.  From there, it was expanded to school partnership exchange when he led a group of students and teachers of Bayreuther Strasse in Wuppertal to Delhi’s Springdale School.  It was then expanded to Delhi Public Schools and soon involved more than 100 schools throughout India when the coordination was taken over by the Goethe Institute, whose branches in India are called Max Mueller Bhawan named after the German Indologist.  Since, 2014, Kendriya Vidyalayas have also been enrolled.