Middlebury School in India

I grew up in a very small town of India, in an age where globalization was a very far off thing. The large Atlas at my home was the only gateway to far off lands. Names of places like Saskatchewan and Newfoundland would amaze me.

Also, it was the era of cold war where India was aligned with the then U.S.S.R. We would receive a lot of Russian promotional magazines and low priced Russian classics. The illustrated magazines brought Russian culture and community to life for us. This is one country that I have always wanted to visit.

I would love to visit not only Moscow and St. Petersburg but also the rural hinterland of Russia. I also want to see the famed cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent which were part of the former U.S.S.R.

Language learning and cultural immersion are complimentary to each other. You cannot have one without the other. These are the two aspects of study abroad that make the learning complete. Reading books and watching movies/ videos gives you a just a glimpse of life in a different culture.

When you travel to another country, live through the experience, only then do you realize the cultural differences. It sensitizes you to the culture of your host country. You have to live in a country to make your experience real.

Knowing the language brings out the context of simple things like TV commercials, popular songs. A few sentences in the local language endears you to people around you. This creates an opportunity for true immersion in the host culture.

I have travelled to different parts of India and 19 countries in the world. Each travel has been a unique experience.

The one experience that stands out is of traveling from Tokyo to Mt. Fuji in Japan. Equipped with some instruction on a piece of paper in Japanese (which I can neither read nor understand), started our three hour journey with two train changes. Using sign language and showing around the small piece of paper combined with the precision of Japanese trains, we had a beautiful journey taking us to our destination.

The other incident that stands out is of my first visit to Paris. As we hurriedly got down at an interchange station, my husband exclaimed that we were at the wrong station. Instead of ‘Villiers’ we had disembarked at ‘Sortie’. For a moment I panicked and looked at the signs at regular intervals only to realize that sortie was the French for exit.

The concept of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”, a Sanskrit phrase which embodies the philosophy that the whole world is one family, is at the core of our program.

India is a multi-cultural country. Each region of India is diverse in its culture and language. Yet there is unity in this diversity. It is a country that teaches you to respect diverse cultures and adapt best practices from each.

Our program helps our students to learn from India’s religious pluralism and cultural diversity.