For Dali Basu, there was never really any doubt about what she would be when she grew up. “As a child I could never sit still,” the 27-year-old says. “I don’t think I ever walked—I was always dancing.” What is perhaps surprising is that Basu channeled her abundant energy into Odissi, a classical Indian dance marked by graceful movements and studied poses.

Dr. R.B. Singh has learned many lessons from his long-standing collaboration with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute over the years. From tasks such as proposal writing to working with large groups of people amidst cultural differences and distances that span the globe, the professor at the Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi says the knowledge has allowed him to grow both professionally and personally.

He has lost count of the number of times he has been to India, but Dr. John Sinclair is under no illusions about the value of those trips. “It has been a life-changing opportunity for me and for the students who have gone,” says Sinclair, a professor and associate head of the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute.

When he flew to Delhi in the summer of 2005 Abbas Janmohamed was making his first trip to India, but in many ways he was catching up with an old friend he’d left behind.

Janmohamed was using a Shastri arts fellowship to pursue his passion for the tabla, the Indian percussion instrument he had started playing as a nine-year-old in Calgary. Within three years, his teacher advised him to go to India to continue his studies. “He said I would need to find an ustad—a master,” Janmohamed says. “There was nobody in Calgary with that kind of command and authority over the music.”

“On a professional level, I can say that I probably wouldn’t be working where I am today if it wasn’t for my Shastri Institute internship,” says Shelly Abdool a former youth internship participant who now works with the Department of Gender, Women and Health (GWH) at the World Health Organization (WHO). “It was my introduction into the field of public health.”

“What is multicultural in Canada pales with what one finds in India where you have so many different languages being spoken; where you have so many different cultures and different religions brought together in a single very populous country,” says Dr. William Coleman, political studies professor at McMaster University. “One comes away from India with so many impressions.”