The future depends on us - more than I think we know

The week has flown by! Pretty soon we will all be back in the United States and that is so hard to believe!  We of course learned a lot again today but did not have a field trip because we are getting up early to go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think we are all pretty excited about that. 

Since many of my peers are studying national security, they really enjoyed the class this morning, which was on Indo-US relations.  The speaker was a professor and is the first Indian I have met who did not have an Indian accent.  She had a very distinct British accent and spoke very eloquently.  She also had a very good presentation.  She talked about how interdependence and globalization in the 21st century has opened the opportunity for engagement and mutual benefit for India and the US.  She talked about foreign policy and how it is basically advancing a country's interests.  The lecture went over the situation today and how everyone is non-aligned and that many think the era of the US as a unipolar power. India is in everyone's future and it is growing.  It wants a relationship with the US but it also wants one with China, especially because they are neighbors.  There are concerns of proliferation, WMD and non-state actors having access to these  as well as maintaining peace and security in this multipolar world.  A few other things mentioned were, of course, Kashmir and the opinion was they need to decide what they want through ballots.  She also said we should stop supplying aid and weapons to Pakistan without conditions.

After tea we talked about the education system in India (higher education). It was interesting to learn about how different higher education is from the US.  Like other countries, Indians have to decide very early in life which career they will have and only the best will be able to succeed.  Even people who are good at what they do may not get far because there are so many people competing against them.  The most interesting and eye-opening comment I got was to my question about study abroad and if it existed in India.  The response was we (Americans) will define global politics.  Indian students will not. We study abroad and learn about India but no university here has study abroad to learn about our politics and government.  This shows the power structure of the world.