US ambassador Richard Verma talks about his India-connect at IIT Madras

Richard Verma, the US ambassador to India, is of Indian origin is a known fact. However, during a talk at IIT Madras, where he largely spoke about the changing nature of Indo-US relations, Verma went down memory lane and described his recent visit to his maternal hometown in Punjab. Besides visiting the two-room house in an alleyway where his mother and grandmother lived after India's partition, he also gave a commencement speech at the DAV College, where his father graduated 64 years ago. "I went to the girls' school where my grandmother taught; I saw her pay records from the mid-1960s showing a few hundred rupees each month. I saw the admission records of my father at DAV college — an admission that lifted this eldest of 11 children from a village, and with the help of a scholarship from the University of Northern Iowa," he recalled.

"They say that understanding where you are from can help you better understand where you want to go – and that trip further crystallised for me the great importance of our deep people-topeople ties and how they can help drive our relationship forward," he added.