Festive spirit, vibrant atmosphere at schools fascinate German students

CHANDIGARH: A group of 15 students and their two teachers from Wuppertal, the city of Frederick Engels in The Northrhine-Westphalian state of Germany, is currently on a tour to northern India to further promote the Indo-German bond, educational cooperation and widen their cultural horizon.

German students and faculty at The Tribune office in Chandigarh on Wednesday. Poto: Nittin Mittal

Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, October 16

A group of 15 students and their two teachers from Wuppertal, the city of Frederick Engels in The Northrhine-Westphalian state of Germany, is currently on a tour to northern India to further promote the Indo-German bond, educational cooperation and widen their cultural horizon. The delegates were in the City Beautiful today.

During a stopover in Chandigarh, they also visited The Tribune office to get a first-hand experience of operations at the region's oldest newspaper.

Under the exchange programme, the German students are visiting Indian schools and interacting with families of adolescents on the issue of plastic pollution.

While sharing their first-time experience, students were all praise for Indian culture, as for them it was a vibrant and colourful experience altogether.

“In India, students are given various projects on societal issues. There are many activities for students here to make the studies interesting,” Laurenz (13) said.

“There are yoga classes here, which is interesting. Contrastingly, the study environment is quite mundane,” Laurenz added. Not only vibrant atmosphere at schools and leniency on the part of caregivers attracted the German delegates, the spirit of festivity drawing rich and poor together also fascinated them. They had also witnessed Dasehra and relished langar in Amritsar a couple of days ago. Isabel (15) said, “The festival brought all together, regardless of caste, creed and religion. We also savoured food at a holy place where people of all classes, whether rich or poor, sat together and ate. In Germany, only homeless people eat at such places.”

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

He said, “Globalisation has not only enhanced inter-national and inter-cultural mobility on our planet, it has, in fact, made the dream of educational and communitarian dynamism of networking among nations a reality.”