'There is always a freshness about India'

'There's excitement. There's vibrancy. If it is politics, even if there's discussion and there's debate, there's vibrancy. That pretty much is the story of India,' says Union Minister Milind Deora in Rediff.com's special series where well-known Indians speak about the India they love.

There are so many things about India that continue to amaze me and increase my respect for the country.

You don't have to travel to get a sense of that. Just by meeting different kinds of people you get a sense of just how great India is. How diverse opinions, cultures, faces are.

India never ceases to amaze me, really.

There is always a freshness about India. I think sometimes people look at India too much (based on) what they watch on television and what they read in the newspapers.

That's actually a very small, tiny little percentage of not even India, but urban India. Even the rest of urban India, forget about rural India, is nothing like that.

My message to people would be that they should really get out and see the country. Experience it first hand, rather than get second hand information on what the country is about.

As a minister, I have learnt about so many departments of my ministry, whether it is the department of posts or telecommunications or what is happening on the ground or in far flung areas of India or rural areas.

There is so much -- if one digs in; you don't have to dig too deep -- to learn about what is happening in this country.

Otherwise, one tends to be perhaps cynical. Or believe nothing is happening here.

The country, for me, has always had a freshness, that I sense in every part of India, whichever part I look at.

There's excitement. There's vibrancy. If it is politics, even if there's discussion and there's debate, there's vibrancy.

That pretty much is the story of India. That's the beauty of it -- whether you go to a chawl in my constituency (Mumbai South) and you experience the distinct culture there or you go to some other part of the country. There's that freshness.

Milind Deora, 37, is a Congress member of Parliament from the Mumbai South constituency, one of the smallest Lok Sabha constituencies in the country -- just 13 sq km.

He is the Union Minister of state for Information Technology and Communications and the ministry of shipping.

One of the youngest members of the 15th Lok Sabha, he is also a guitarist and plays the blues.

He spoke to Vaihayasi Pande Daniel.

The complete series: Why I love India