Twenty-nine youths of Indian origin from nine countries have arrived here for the latest edition of an orientation programme that is meant to help them rediscover their roots.
Welcoming the participants to the Know India Programme (KIP) here Thursday, Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi said, "you have known about India from your parents and grandparents. This is a chance for you to see India with your own eyes."
He exhorted the participants to explore and experience the real India through the programme, organised by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Nehru Yuva Kendra Sangathan.
"Don't just go back after taking in the sights in cities like Delhi," Ravi said, adding: "Go to the rural areas. See the villages. That is the real India."
This year, Goa is the host state for the programme that runs Aug 29-Sep 15. The organisers have chalked out a series of events in collaboration with the Goa government to showcase Indian life and culture to the youth, who have come from countries like Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, South Africa, Canada, Britain, Malaysia, Mauritius, the Netherlands and Israel.
The participants will spend the first three days in Delhi attending lectures on Indian history, constitution and governance. In between they will also visit the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Maruti Suzuki car plant in Gurgaon.
Thereafter, they will proceed to Goa where they will be taken around the Goa University, the National Institute of Oceanography, BITS Pilani's Sancoale campus, the Mormugao Port Trust and an eco-tourism site among other places.
A highlight of their Goa sojourn will be visits to villages in interior areas where they will get to know the rural way of life by attending mock panchayat sessions and doing field work on issues like democracy at grassroots level, women's empowerment and empowerment of youth.
This apart, they will also take in the sights and sounds of Goa.
The participants come from different backgrounds - one is a fashion designer from Malaysia, another a teaching assistant from Canada while a third is a project team leader in British auto giant Rolls Royce. They are all excited about their visit here.
Said Jaya Manikchand, an attorney-at-law in Guyana: "I didn't feel at all strange after landing in India. The people are very warm and hospitable."
Manikchand, whose grandparents migrated to the Caribbean nation from Uttar Pradesh, looked forward to taking part in the community development programmes being organised as part of the KIP.
"I want to take back ideas from here so I can replicate them in Guyana," she said.
Though she had to take a circuitous route from her country to India - from Guyana to Trinidad to Barbados to London and finally to Delhi - she summed up the mood of the participants when she said: "I didn't really like the journey. But now I know it was worth it."
To have the most children, men should find a partner six years younger and women a mate four years older, Austrian researchers said on Wednesday.
The researchers tried to use evolution to explain why men often prefer younger women and what typically drives women’s desire for older men, said their leader, Vienna University anthropologist Martin Fieder.
While it is no surprise to hear that men pick younger women to bolster their reproductive fitness and that women choose older partners for security, the study is the first to quantify the age difference that results in the most children, he said.
"Nobody has shown before this has consequences for the number of offspring," Fieder said in a telephone interview. "We have shown for the first time this is the case."
The researchers wanted to find the most beneficial ages for both men and women to have the most offspring, so looked at the data with that in mind and came out with different numbers for each.
Writing in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters on Wednesday, the researchers said they collected information from Swedish national registries to track the number of births and age of parents going back 55 years.
The researchers looked at men and women who did not change their partners between the birth of their first and last child and found the age differences among couples that produced the most offspring.
For both men and women, having a partner of the optimal age meant having an average of 2.2 children compared with 2.1 children when they picked partners of the same age — a significant number in evolutionary terms that accumulates over time, Fieder said.
The findings are the result of a statistical analysis and do not mean that every man can find a woman six years younger and that every women would find a man four years older. "It was a very systemic pattern," Fieder said. "We don’t think it is random."
The study of couples during their typical child-bearing years also showed that both men and women who changed partners usually chose a person younger than the one they had before for their second one, Fieder said.
In a climb down, the Government today put on hold the operationalisation of the Indo-US civil nuclear deal pending the findings of a committee constituted to go into the objections raised by the Left parties.
"The operationalisation of the deal will take into account the Committee's findings," a statement read out by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said after a meeting of the Congress and Left parties, bringing to an end the three-week stand-off between the two sides on the deal.
The meeting decided to set up a committee, the composition of which would be announced shortly.
Though Mukherjee did not take any questions after the 30-minute meeting at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's residence, the Left leaders said the statement makes it very clear that the Government will not operationalise the deal till the committee's findings are known.
Ever since the details of the 123 agreement were made public, the Left parties had demanded that the deal should not be operationalised while the government maintained that there was no going back on the issue.
Matters took a serious turn when Singh dared the Left parties to withdraw support to the government on the issue and they hit back warning of serious consequences if the government went ahead with the deal.
The statement by Mukherjee said in view of the objections raised by the Left parties on the Indo-US bilateral agreement on nuclear cooperation, it has been decided to constitute a committee to go into these issues.
