Sambandh: Where Norway Meets India - A chat with Dr Shashi Tharoor

Okay, well, this all sounds very promising, and I'm delighted about that.

The point is that Norwegian and Nordic shipping generally has had an association with India going back a long way.

Many hundred

years, actually.

And I think it'll be wonderful if we can develop that further.

And I might add further that we shouldn't confine ourselves to fisheries.

There's lots happening.

I know that you are all trying to develop AI and IT technology, and we have a lot of brainpower available, perhaps more than your smaller population will offer you.

So you might want to collaborate with us in that field as well.

And I'm not talking about aid at all.

I'm talking about actually joint ventures and cooperation.

You know, another small country like Norway, Israel, has done the same thing in India by coming up with brilliant ideas.

They don't have enough people to execute and then getting people in India to sit down and work it out, that kind of thing.

We are already benefiting from the great Indian talent.

There are 30,000 Indians in Norway now.

30,000? Yes.

And most of them have come in the last 25 years.

They are not students.

But do they come as students? But they're mostly young engineers and they're working in the IT sector and then also in the AI sector.

And, you know, I also believe this great scope for cooperation here.

And I don't think, you know, there is no aid to give from Norway there because I think you have more to, we have more to learn from India than we have to teach you.

We do have a wonderful sort of abundance of technological skills, engineering skills, software coding skills, all of that.

Some of those things, of course, nowadays are essentially being consumed by AI.

And so you need more people with expertise in how to manage AI, how to develop AI, and so on, than to do the kinds of things that now AI can do more efficiently and faster than humans can, which is a new development.

This is all something transforming our lives.