Keya Choudhury is a Berlin-based intercultural trainer: She helps individuals and organisations prepare to work in different cultural environments than their own. Taking some time off from her current assignment in Bangalore, Keya recently came to Delhi for a short holiday. Being highly energetic and proactive, sight-seeing and meeting friends proved not fulfilling enough, so she enrolled in a week-long intensive Hindi course with Language Must. In this refreshingly lively interview, Keya shares some of her experiences learning Hindi, living in India and navigating different cultures.

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Ever thought about picking up a new language but not too sure about which language to learn? German could be the right choice for you, whatever your background or your plans in life. There are numerous arguments that speak for learning German language, especially if you already know how to use English. What makes it difficult for many language learners to successfully learn a new language is the initial effort needed to build up a solid basis of vocabulary and grammatical understanding. English and German both being Indo-Germanic languages and having lots of interaction throughout history, you will be surprised at the many similarities you will be able to detect between the languages.

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In Delhi friends of the arts, music and entertainment have marked 16.10.2010 to celebrate an interplay of artistic diversity. At Max Mueller Bhavan (how the Goethe-Institut is known in India), followed by an after show party around the corner at Aqua (in The Park Hotel New Delhi), the Sound Tamasha family will release the first of its kind electronic music compilation of Indo European artist collaborations: Sound Tamasha – Spectaculicious House (Creative Commons Only).

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As a result of stronger ties between Germany and India, cultural relations between the two countries have found new impetus drawn from a longer tradition of German-Indo cultural exchange. Foreign cultural policy experiences multiple incentives and support on both sides, which makes it useful to establish sustainable structures of cultural dialogue. However, a number of factors could be listed to shed light on the still asymmetrical nature that marks cultural relations between India and Germany. Among them are: different conceptions of foreign cultural policy, different stages of the respective art industry and cultural infrastructure, a historically determined imbalance of financial and infrastructural resources and the sheer ignorance in the way both countries have perceived the other.

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This is not an average travel narrative, replete with the wonders of a world that is truly wondrous: a jazzy world that, yet, has a large, welcoming heart. This is, perhaps, not an image run-of-the-mill Hollywood WW2/spy-flicks generate, immersed, as they seem to be, in anachronistic assumptions and the resultant antipathies. But, it is clear to this writer, Germany and Berlin define the new Gross European Cool, framed in terms of “Multi-Kulti” (multiculturalism, in colloquial German) and a Kalkbrennerian Zeitgeist.

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I used to be a passionate cyclist in Berlin – now I cycle in Delhi. People have told me that Delhi used to have separate lanes for cyclists. Back then when South Delhi was still a conglomeration of villages, cars were the more exceptional mode of transportation. Sometime back the space was taken over by cars and planning was taken over by those who thought a modern city needed wide streets for cars rather than lanes for its inhabitants to walk on, or ride on their bikes – often affectionately referred to by Germans as their “Drahtesel” (a ‘donkey made out of wire’ in German language).

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