For me, India is about incredible diversity and endless exploration. I am lucky to have seen quite a lot in over 30 years of my association with India, much longer than my almost four-year-long ambassadorial posting. I feel at ease and at home in Delhi, and yet India continues to surprise me almost daily.
I got fascinated by India in childhood after seeing the movie Umrao Jaan (1981), but my interest in India grew much beyond movies to become a serious academic interest. For a child who grew up under Soviet rule, the dream of going to India was very ephemeral, as very few in the Soviet Union could actually travel abroad. It was the collapse of the USSR and the restored independence of Lithuania that made it possible.I came to India first in 1994 as a young diplomat of the newly independent Lithuania for a young diplomats’ training course. Before that, I studied several Indian subjects at Vilnius University: Sanskrit, Hindi, Indian philosophy. It was in Delhi that I was bitten by the “Indian history bug”. Delhi turned out to be incredibly rich in history, yet complex and multi-layered, a city that bled so many times.
As I visited Agra, Jaipur, Ajmer, Bengaluru, Mysuru, Goa, my history map of India started filling up. I went on to read history books. Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru, and The Wonder That Was India by AL Basham were my first textbooks on the cultural history of India.At Kinnaur Kailash peak in Himachal Pradesh, with colleagues Ms Eliška Žigova, Ambassador of Czech Republic, and Ms Andrea Wojnar, Country Representative, UNFPA India | Photo courtesy: Diana Mickevičienė
