Washington: Second Lady of the United States Usha Vance described her visit to India in April ‘as the trip of a lifetime’ for the family and said her three young children have put Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the ‘grandfather category’.
Vice President JD Vance undertook his first official visit to India in April and was accompanied by Usha Vance and their three young children, Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
“It really was the trip of a lifetime for us,” Usha Vance said, recalling the visit to India during a fireside chat here on Monday at the eighth edition of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF) Leadership Summit.
The Vances were in India from April 21-24 and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi before travelling to Jaipur and Agra.
Usha Vance emphasised that meeting PM Modi “was really very special.”
“We’d actually had a chance to meet him before,” she said, adding that when her kids, who were sleep-deprived when travelling in Paris, saw the Prime Minister, they “saw an Indian man with a white beard and white hair, and they just put him in the grandfather category immediately. So they are very into him.
“They just love him. And he really cemented his status by giving our five-year-old a birthday present that day,” she said.
The Vances and PM Modi had met in France in February during the AI Action Summit.
She recalled that when the Vance family visited PM Modi’s residence in Delhi, her kids ran up to him and were hugging him. “He was just incredibly kind and generous to them.”
She noted that the conversation between her husband and the Prime Minister was “very productive” and “it was a real opportunity for us to kind of cement that personal relationship that they have, which I think is only to the good.”
Vance further said that her children had never been to India before because of the pandemic and her husband’s political schedules, but they have grown up knowing “so much about this country, the stories, the food, the relationships with grandparents and friends, but they had never actually seen it. So it was just sort of mind-blowing from their perspective.”
Noting that for her and her husband, “it just could not have been any more special” as the family had the opportunity to see some of the greatest sights in north India.
“We’re looking forward to our next trip and trying to get to the parts of the country where my family is from as well,” she said, referring to Andhra Pradesh where her parents Krish Chilukuri and Lakshmi Chilukuri are from.
“It just was sort of one hit after another,” Vance said as she spoke fondly of the “most incredible food”, peacocks, seeing the Taj Mahal, puppet shows, with puppeteering from all over the country, including from Andhra Pradesh, where her family is from.
“There were bits from the Ramayana. There were sort of comedic bits with animals. And it was a huge hit.”
Vance said that when the family was at the Prime Minister’s residence, her son was “just so taken by everything and then taken by the entire cart of mangoes that was available for him to eat that he announced to the Prime Minister that he thought he could maybe live there and started making his plans…He just loved it.”
She said that her children talk about the visit to India “all the time.
“They’ve been all over the place, and they’ve had wonderful opportunities to see the world, but this was really special to them,” she said, adding that her oldest son Ewan was really taken by the sculptures in the temple that he visited and thought it was incredible craftsmanship.
Vivek, the Vances’ middle child, was very excited to meet elephants, peacocks, camels and “just any animal that he could kind of get his hands on.”
She said that her daughter Mirabel really enjoyed her time in an auto rickshaw.
“That was maybe the highlight for her. The Secret Service was very generous and allowed us to kind of drive in an enclosed area for a few minutes. So we had a lot of fun with that.”
PTI
