India's mega cultural festival in Egypt to begin next month

India will organise nearly a month- long mega festival beginning next month in Egypt, showcasing diversity of its culture, arts, music, films and cuisine to build enduring partnerships between the two ancient civilisations.
The mega cultural festival 'India by the Nile' will be held from April 20 to May 16 in different parts of the country and will bring several cultural activities that will engage Egyptians of all ages, India's Ambassador to Egypt Sanjay Bhattacharyya said.
"The festival will be held in several centres primarily out of Cairo and Alexandria but we will also be going to other cities along the Suez Canal and may be if it is possible to place it in Upper Egypt, we are still working on the details of that," Bhattacharyya said.

'India by the Nile' has emerged as the largest foreign cultural festival in Egypt and it has attracted the attention of a large number of Egyptians through the previous editions.
Last year, Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan opened the festival.
"We wanted to expand the scope of India by the Nile to beyond Bollywood. Bollywood will remain as a very major feature but we will bring with us in this year's festival new elements so we would like to bring new elements of music and dance, theater and films," he told PTI.

"We will also bring some new aspects new kinds of cuisine or fashion and how we work on some of our social issues, like holding seminars on street children or the empowerment of young people and women," said the Ambassador, adding that this year's festival will reach out to the Egyptian people in many new ways.

"The cultural engagement between India and Egypt goes back to a long way and the flagship for this cultural engagement is the Indian Culture center which was named after Mulana Azad who was a graduate of Al-Azhar University," the Ambassador said.
"So in the culture sector, we run courses in Yoga, Indian languages, Indian dance and occasionally we have other experiences like exhibitions and seminars, cooking classes and other aspects of culture exchange.
There are also manage to the flow of students from Egypt to India under scholarships provided by the India Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR)," Ambassador Bhattacharyya explained.

The Embassy is paying great attention to youth of Egypt and organises events to enhance their participation.
"We would like to get in touch with the young people of Egypt. We strongly believe that the youth of the country form the foundations of relationship particularly for two countries who are engaged to future relationships," the Ambassador said.
The Ambassador also said that India is in the very advanced stage of establishment of Indian chair in one of the very prominent universities in Egypt.
"Once that is done I think it will be a good beginning in fact it will be the first Indian chair in the entire Arab world," he added.