Neelam Deo sees warm relations across the board.

Question: How has India changed over the past five years?

Neelam Deo:    You know, India has been traditionally an assimilative culture, we are the oldest continuous civilization in the world. And we have been evolving ourselves and we have received stimulus from the flow of people, the flow of ideas into India as well. So, culture anywhere is a living thing, but in the Indian case, it is much more assimilative than it has been perhaps in other areas. So, is Indian culture changing and evolving? Yes. Is it changing at a faster pace than in the past? Yes.

I think that there is, simultaneously, a huge renewal of interest in our classical art forms. There is a flowering of Indian painters. Modern Indian painters now command huge prices in international sales. The numbers of writers the literary arena, lots and lots of Indians writing in English making it big both in the west as well as in India where there is a large reading public, but also, writers in regional languages. In fact India today is one of the few countries where the print media is absolutely blossoming even as it loses space elsewhere.