In an inspiring address at the South Asia Women in Energy Summit organized by the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum (USISPF), U.S. Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti reflected on the enduring bond between the United States and India. Speaking to an audience on Monday morning, Ambassador Garcetti emphasized the significance of the U.S.-India relationship and its transformative potential for addressing global challenges.
Here’s Full Speech:
“You know so often in life, life feels like a run on sentence, doesn’t it? We go from one entry in our calendar to the next, without a comma to pause and reflect, a period, an exclamation point to celebrate or a question mark to ask. And these moments, as I’ve said with the Mission here in Delhi and throughout India, that the years tell us things the days cannot see. Let me take this precipice of two years and really more like almost forty years of coming to India to speak about the excitement, the promise, the challenge of this.
This, sometimes challenging, but more often than not compelling consequential relationship between two incredible countries that have certainly been part of the through thread in my own life, but I hope for all of you. You wouldn’t be in this room if you didn’t believe in this.
I want to start by thanking USISPF, maybe their entire team. You’re right, I know this is not the end because once you’re a part of their universe, it’s like India, they’re never going to let you go. And I embrace that and I look forward to that. And I welcome that you are such professionals, this board, this network, your team, your staff. You know that when you’re focused on something, it will get done, but it will be done with a heart, and it will be done with morals, will be done with values and it will always keep in mind that overlap of U.S. and India. So, thank you for the friendship, thank you for the support and thank you for the inspiration.
And this annual summit, that you’re here for, the summit of South Asia Women in Energy, it truly inspires me because it brings two other threads that have been cornerstones of my own work as a public servant. The empowerment of women and confronting the greatest crisis of our lifetimes, the climate crisis together to figure out how can we still add our own energy to the production of the mechanical energy we need, the electrical energy we need in order to power prosperity in the future, and so how do our countries work together across this region? That really is not only one of the great regions, but if you look at between what is called West Asia or the Middle East to here and call that a super region, really the cradle of civilization. Religion, the great civilizations, the human knowledge, the innovations, the scientific breakthroughs really come from here and need to be written from here in the future as well.
I’m also very pleased to be sharing the stage with Minister Devi, who’s long been such a champion of women and girls issues too, and I know that she shares that passion of mine as an Ambassador and a father. Nothing bad to report, but I was, you know, at the hospital at eleven o’ clock last night getting X-rays on my daughter’s injury from volleyball practice. We thought it was a broken thumb, but it’s not. But a parent ‘s work is never done, and we know that if we’re not thinking through, people as related to other people, and families and communities we’re missing what policy is really supposed to do?
And it’s wonderful to be here with Vartika and Vaishali as well, who demonstrate how industry and government can come together to protect our planet. So, when I came here, I looked at this, the second largest mission that the United States has now in the world. Second only to our mission in Mexico, our neighbor. Now [India] is the second largest source of visas to the United States, and number one source of students.
I looked at everything we were doing from defense partnerships to USAID, I looked at the technology, economic and trade work we are doing, our climate, women ‘s empowerment, health work and I said this is so wide, nobody knows how to tell the story.
It’s just the U.S. and India and we do big general things, like the two biggest democracies in the world, we are the oldest and the largest democracy. We talk about the history that we have together, United States supporting Indian independence of the early assistance programs that help a brand new, proud nation get on its feet with agriculture, and with universities and research. We talk about that because we don’t know how to describe something so wide and so broad.
So I kind of – as I was here for few months – thought through what are the ways we as a Mission can communicate internally and externally what it is that we do, because we are a mission in both sense of the word. A mission that is physical, seven posts in seven great Indian cities that do everything from trade, to work on the environment, educational and cultural programs. These seven posts, how do we communicate with ourselves what it is that we do and then share that story with India.
So, I came up with these four P’s. Now this is a long title, but get to the last one there and that’s the first of the four P’s and I’m giving a series of four speeches that started with peace, prosperity, planet, and our people. I won’t go into the other three today, but peace is everything from our defense partnership to human rights and civil, values and things that preserve the peace. Prosperity is our economic work and our technology driven work of our critical emerging technologies. Our people are the cornerstone of everything we do [like] our educational exchanges, putting cricket into the Olympics, looking at ways that we can share and understand our culture. But this level describes the work that we do that ignores borders, those things, whether it’s health pandemics and health work that we do, or the climate crisis, that really is about our planet above all else. So those four P’s which are also kind of four S’s in Hindi, so shanti, samriddhi, swasth, which is really health, the health of our planet and our people and subdefining the s in Hindi maybe logon ki sajehdari which is a kind of a people partnership. Those are the four S’s. I love when other people are like oh an American speaks English!
Today I really want to focus on our planet because it is the cradle of our health and everything that we do stems from that. This summit highlights an essential truth that preserving our planet requires us to face challenges that really know no boundaries. Climate change, public health threats, the demand for sustainable energy, I would offer are the biggest threats that we have lived through in recent history. Think about the trauma of the COVID pandemic and what our children will live through. Because every child today, in the same way that some of us, when we were growing up, feared nuclear annihilation knows unlike that, which might happen that climate damage is happening and they fear their future.
It doesn’t matter whether we live in Los Angeles or Lucknow, in Boston or in Bengaluru, the health of our families, the stability of our communities, the sustainability of our planet depends on the work that we are doing, and how we share our best practices and expertise, and invest in our collective resilience. So as we work in concert to meet these challenges, it will be women, innovators and entrepreneurs, leaders who will stand at the forefront of this. Women have always been responsible for caring for the health of their communities and their families. Men are learning to step up and following that leadership. But when it comes to both our environment and our personal health, women are the natural leaders of this movement to find solutions that uplift entire societies.
You know, when I presented to President Murmu my papers and was officially a minted United States Ambassador, the 26th U.S. ambassador to India, the first trip I took was to Ahmedabad. And I was sitting down after taking a tour of the old city and visited the headquarters of SEWA [Self Employed Women’s Association], this incredible women-led organization. I don’t know, people probably know the stats better than me, 30,000-40,000 chapters in India of communities where women come together to assess their needs, empower themselves and work for better lives for their sisters and brothers around them. And there’s a woman there, who still haunts me because she talked about her work in the construction industry. And it’s striking to Americans, where we don’t see enough construction workers in America but here there’s a lot of women who work in the construction sites, and she was a bricklayer. And she talked about how climate change was changing her life, that it was so hot now on certain days in Gujarat that even with gloves on, she couldn’t hold the bricks, they were so, so hot. And almost crying, she worried that she wouldn’t have a way to support her family, that on days when she couldn’t work, the family couldn’t eat.
And another story to me – first of all, I want to quit being Ambassador and just go work for SEWA because I was like, this is the work or maybe join USAID, so if there’s a spot for me Steve, you let me know. It was underscoring that this isn’t about giga tons of carbon, this isn’t about measuring temperature scientifically. This is about the impact on real people’s lives, whether they’ll be able to survive economically, physically or whether entire communities will stay even inhabited at all. But as I looked at the work, those words stayed with me as I stitched together, now, in 24 out of 28 Indian states that I visited, these stories that really take forward the work that we do and provide us, I think, a very clear pathway.
Lisa Browne, my chief of staff, and I woke up yesterday in Jharkhand, in Dumka. The first U.S. ambassador, at least everybody in Dumka said, to ever visit Dumka. And we went to a girl’s school on a Sunday, [where] Santali girls performed dances and shared their culture, and you could see in their eyes the dreams of what they had to get an education, usually the first in their family to do so, maybe to graduate, maybe even to chase a dream, to be able to have a life where they can provide for themselves.
And in many ways, those folks mirror our hopes of this relationship, the U.S. and India that have deepened our ties in so many remarkable ways. We know that climate change is, of course, about tackling emissions, but it’s not just about emissions. It’s about building health systems and similarly, our health work has an impact on the environment around us.
When I grew up in the city that had the most polluted air in America, where it was estimated that my lungs, my sister ‘s lungs and others are 85 percent of the size and capacity they should be because of pollution. We had to learn the lessons. It was mothers who came to City Hall to protest the health and the environment of their children, with gas masks on, that caused policy makers to move. And here in Delhi, where it’s estimated 8 and a half to 10 years of your life, is cut short if you live and work outside in this pollution. We must share those practices and those solutions together to find the way forward. And we’re just as often learning from India, as we are bringing our past history and our opportunities and resources forward, whether it’s strengthening supply chains in India so critical to our world’s future for that, investing in disaster resilience, and this is the headquarters of the international organization CDRI [Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure] that does that, and we are so proud to co-chair. Or driving economic growth through work, and health, and the environment that lifts people out of poverty and sets us on a sustainable path in our health and our economy.
We know that together we have taken bold steps that illustrate what democracies, at their best, can do. You know, autocracies, I often used to joke when I was mayor. Yeah, I went to China once and I was talking about planting a million trees in Los Angeles, and I was meeting with the mayor who said, oh I planted four million last year. And of course, ’cause, he said, “These are where the trees are going to go; if you if you need to, move the house.” There’s no democracy involved, no protest, no anything. Those difficulties of doing work in both India and the United States. But I would never have it any other way because the flip side is when you have a democracy, you can engage people in the change around them. You can listen to the solutions they might have, you can contest and then kind of synthesize the best way to move forward.
So, let’s look at that system and this relationship, starting with health, to assess where we’re at and where we’re going. We require global cooperation with anything that’ll humble us. I was walking with my friend Julie, who’s visiting from Los Angeles in our Embassy this morning. We have a monument that we put up last year of the six people in our mission that we lost to COVID. Too many of us lost loved ones and too many of us are still affected by the trauma of what happened. But the U.S. and India, I have always said are not U.S. plus India, it’s not a relationship of addition, it’s the U.S. times India. It’s a relationship of multiplication, and we come together on vaccines and our work on non-communicable diseases. When we protect lives, when we foster resilience, when we build systems that safeguard future generations, we are bigger than India and bigger than America, and bigger than India and America together.
And we care about more than our own people. We care about the world. India has always brought light into the world in so many ways and America, at our best, is about being able to do the same thing. In August, we kicked off the first ever U.S.- India Cancer Moonshot dialogue, a priority of President Biden, who himself lost his son to cancer. All of us have those stories, my sister and parents have survived cancer seven times, and I know what that feels like in a family to have that sort of fear and devastation. So, we brought together scientists, policy makers, Nobel Prize winners, cancer survivors, advocates, medical professionals from both countries to confront the daunting challenges and to look at the amazing healthcare work here. The database of medical data that India has, to be able to look at new genetic based solutions, to look at innovative ways to bring new pharmaceuticals and therapeutic solutions. Non communicable diseases, including cancer, account for approximately 63 percent of all deaths in India, with cancer cases estimated to increase nearly 13 percent just over the last five years, from 2020-2025.
So, leveraging our respective strengths, our shared vision US and India are working together to save lives and protect families in the United States, India and the world. And we know that health well-being is also about our national well-being. That no country exists in isolation, and that’s why we’ve created a Tri-DeP, or trilateral development program, that helps us bring in third countries to train in healthcare. We started with Fiji where healthcare workers that work remotely benefit from Indian doctors and nurses who know how to do telemedicine and to think of those remote islands in Fiji where people have no hope and no care. Together with USAID we first trained healthcare professionals in Fiji, many of whom had family links back to India because of migration in past centuries, because of that, we built on that and with the Philippines, we’ve done the same thing. Now we’re working in Tanzania, and working in Kenya on everything from electric buses to solar power. Again, the U.S. and India saying let’s get together, not selfishly to work on our own relationship or our own needs, but selflessly working on the health and the climate work of other countries.
More broadly through the U.S.-India Triangular Development Partnership, we’re working on specialized training. And so, if you have countries that you know are interested, I’ve spoken so many ambassadors and High Commissioners about this, and they get so excited about doing something with the U.S. and India. Sometimes India opens doors that are not as wide open for America and vice versa. But I bet there’s almost no door in the world that one of our countries can’t open, and together that doesn’t impress those countries.
So now across seventeen partner countries, Tri-DeP has its sights set on what we can do to improve health outcomes abroad and build global resilience, find innovation and solution, and again, we don’t just preach and teach, we listen and learn. Bringing back new solutions through those countries as well. Under the U.S.-Indo vaccine program, I think a couple of the most moving moments I’ve had as ambassador have been looking at the breakthroughs we’re doing in the vaccines. I remember when we heard that in the United States there was a breakthrough where all four major strains of dengue fever, which have never had a single vaccine for all four, that there was a vaccine with efficacy above 80 percent on all four, have been created. But the United States doesn’t have a lot of dengue nor do we have the technical knowledge of scaling up vaccines like India. So, we shared this with three companies here, one of which is in the third round of clinical trials and soon the world will have the first dengue fever vaccine that will hit all four major strains. It’s an example of what the U.S. and India does together.
That was from NIH [National Institutes of Health] to Panacea biotech in India. And also, with malaria [vaccines], I looked at the amazing Pune headquarters of the world’s – I think 40 percent of the vaccines are made by a single company. And that company, at cost took another breakthrough from the United States and Oxford University on a new malaria vaccine that we loaded up at the Serum Institute on to a truck knowing it was going to go to a plane to be flying, to flown to Africa, where a child dies every minute. Every minute an African child dies because of malaria, and we’ll never be able to count the success because you can’t count the living but we know there will be African children, and globally children who will survive because the U.S. and India got together in this incredible, incredible partnership starting with Central African Republic. The rotavirus vaccine, supported by the U.S.-Indo vaccine action program, reduced deaths in children under five by 38 percent, and decreased the misuse of antibiotics to treat rotavirus infections by 22 percent.
Additionally, we’re scaling 90 different health innovations from drone delivery, medical supplies in Arunachal Pradesh that’s providing jobs for women in one of the most remote parts of India, to benefit 45 million people across India through USAID supported private-public partnerships. The SAMRIDH, which is mobilizing $330 million from the American people and the private sector, and blended financing to invest in innovators in the healthcare solutions. So bottom line, when the U.S. and India get together, we save lives.
You know, we’ll be left at the end of our days with two things, who did we know and what did we do? I’ve been so lucky in these two years to know all of you, whether it’s inside the Mission or my Indian friends who just have opened up their hearts, their work, their asks of us and given us the privilege to partner with you, but it’s the substance of the work that we will remember. Those things that we did not clear in our emails, not going to a fancy dinner, but the moments when we kind of were able to do one thing that was a little bit of a steer pivot of history that changed the world for the better.
You know, I always ask our embassy folks to inhabit your future backwards-looking selves. Imagine yourselves 20 years from now, this moment, this speech, this place, imagine yourself as you go on your day, and did you spend time today doing something that you remember 20 years from now or something unimportant? And what can you do? Even if it’s five minutes or ten minutes to make that call to have that connection to maybe have that chai with somebody that is about a new partnership that will affect people for the better. That’s what this relationship is about. We know that health doesn’t just depend on medical breakthroughs, but also on the resilience of our infrastructure and the reliability of our energy supply.
A single disaster, I don’t know how many of you have read the Ministry for the Future. It’s a piece of fiction, but if you’ve never read it, read the opening because it starts here in India where extreme heat finally one day is unimaginable. And people in a small town here in India have no place to go, the one air conditioner in the clinic, people are rushing into. They’re literally going into the water to try to cool themselves, but it’s so hot that that doesn’t do anything. People start to die en masse. That future is not unimaginable, but we still can do the work to make sure it never happens. That here in India where 800 million people are climate vulnerable and it happens in my own city where we have seniors who are too poor to afford air conditioning and we have a heat wave and they die, a statistic never counted.
But make no mistake, climate change is killing human beings and threatening community strength. But the United States and India have been proud to chair the [Coalition] for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure CDRI, founded here by India. We have the honor with our USAID administrator Samantha Power to co-chair the last two years of work together. To make sure that communities have the training, that we don’t just focus on reducing carbon, which is absolutely necessary; but that we help people live in the current conditions that they’re in. That woman with the bricks, with innovations where we’re seeing people do things like work insurance, where that woman if she can’t work one day, gets paid because of a very inexpensive insurance program that a non-profit in the United States has put together to make sure people can adapt to a day where they might not have their means.
The international platform of CDRI is incredible, it’s based on the principle that prevention is better that the cure. And so, by advising governments globally, sharing best practices, crafting guidelines, doing community-based training, and remember the training that we do, there was talk about training that was happening on the island off of Andhra Pradesh, that was training for one type of disaster. But a different type of disaster came, when there was flooding in extreme ways that came in a monsoon and because they had been trained for one disaster, they were resilient and ready for a different kind. We never will train for the exact disaster that’s coming but getting people to think about how they ask their neighbors, know how to assess the community need, who has pets or people with disabilities that need to be taken care of, where do you go in a disaster? How can you rebuild? Where are the resources?
How can you not just wait for somebody to save the day, but save your community yourself? That is the work of CDRI that we are doing and when a disaster strikes, services can be restored quickly, lives can be saved. And as co-chairs, we did so much work to incorporate when we build infrastructure, build in a way that is climate resilient as well. We’re focused on where people live every single day. The buses that they take to go to school and work, like the 10,000 e-buses that USAID is helping to ensure, so that when Indian companies, bus companies buy these, they have a guarantee behind them so that the financing works out, so that the air is cleaned-up, so that jobs are created in the factories that are creating the next generation of e-buses that maybe we’ll buy in America one day right here from India. And at COP 28, we introduced a financial plan that includes over four hundred million dollars to guarantee payments for up to ten billion dollars in loans for making and deploying these buses. The ultimate goal is to get 40,000 e-buses on the road here in India, to create cleaner communities and more resilient cities.
Of course, building green future also depends on how we generate energy. I know a lot of people have asked, you know, there is going to be an administration change in America so are we still committed. Let me just speak from a personal perspective, that sometimes even if Washington isn’t as focused on climate change, the communities of America are. I founded a group called Climate Mayors, and when our country threatened to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, the only country in the world, by the way, a few years ago; cities jumped into action, Republican-led, Democratic-led, independent-led cities. By the end, we had 737 cities across 48 of our 50 states, who said we will enact the work of Paris Agreement.
And you know Delhi can make promises too, but we know that comes down to people in Dunka, in Hyderabad, in Guwahati, in Amritsar, in Kochi, you know I’ll have to name every city in India. In every community, goals that are great and – don’t get me wrong, the central government here has set bold goals and I’m seeing India pour more into renewable energy than nearly any other country on the face of the earth. But it will come down to community work that we do.
So don’t worry, America ‘s going to be your partner no matter what; and we are committed, as we’ve shown, with billions of dollars of green investment flowing into solar and wind projects, electric vehicle production, energy storage solutions. And as I learned when I was mayor of LA, where we outpaced the rest of the big American cities in the world in job growth, it was because these industries are the jobs of the future. Seventy percent of the jobs that we saw net gain in Los Angeles when I was mayor came from green jobs. So, when you invest in new ways of generating power, when you invest in making electric vehicles, when you invest in water recycling, when you invest in the things that clean up people’s lives, air and reduce emissions, you will see economic prosperity come as well. And India’s ambitious targets and policies are making it a leader in solar and wind capacity, not just for this country, but to be able to manufacture at cost for the world, the solar panels that we need, the electrolyzes that we want, the batteries that are critical. India will, mark my words in this next thirty years, be the shop floor for the renewable energy revolution.
With a $500 million loan, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation in Tamil Nadu, with First Solar, created 2,000 jobs in a state-of-the-art factory that is the size I think they said of twenty-five cricket pitches. Imagine a warehouse that big, that I witnessed that is 1,100 high skilled operations, 40 percent held by women, to manufacture solar panels that can be used here and in the United States. That’s an example of what this partnership’s about. We also locked the U.S.- India, new and emerging Renewable Energy Technology Action Platform [RETAP]. I’m going to ask you if you remember that whole thing, no, just kidding. It’s RETAP, it’s easier to remember then; as a partnership between our Department of Energy and the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. But RETAP is looking at those emerging technologies that are absolutely critical to the future. Our ten national laboratories that we’re bringing here, talking to Indian states about everything from grids to the storage of energy. When we have excess energy generation, that today is being wasted. Together, the synergy of policies, of investments, of jobs, of entrepreneur led solutions, is really showing the world a pathway to hope, to prosperity and to health for the future.
And among the most exciting frontiers in our shared efforts to understand and protect the planet actually takes us far away from our planet into space. And we can’t wait, we think finally it’ll be in this first quarter of the year, NISAR (NASA-ISRO SAR Mission), one of the most complicated, complex, exquisite pieces of technology ever put together by human hands – half ISRO and half NASA – will be launched. And the NISAR satellite will be ISRO’s synthetic aperture radar, which is a fancy way of saying it’s kind of like our doctor in the sky. In the same way we go to a doctor, and we get our vitals taken – our blood pressure, our pulse, our height, our weight, this will take, 24/7, those symptoms of the earth.
How warm the oceans are, what the ocean level is, where extreme weather is coming from to better understand better adapt, better prepare for, and share that story with the world of what’s happening with climate change. Real time data on deforestation, glacier melting, sea level rise and the overall health of our planet. It shows us as testament that literally we say it, but I can give the examples that this partnership goes from the seabed all the way to the stars.
We’re working in preserving our oceans and the diversity of our oceans here in the Indian Ocean with the Indian Ocean Dialogue, we are working on reforestation. You know that one of the greatest forests is the people’s forest, that the idea of this great Himalayan Forest that goes from Nepal all the way to Burma. It’s either the second or third largest forest in the world and helping India, which has done such an amazing job of preserving parts of it, but also to replant those parts across these countries that have been devastated will be one of the legacies we work on together.
So let me just kind of bring all of this together. Our planet will continue to remind us of her needs. Our planet is crying out for us to listen and to take care of each other. To not become more atomized, but to become more connected, to figure out not the ways in the things that divide us, which seems to be increasingly, sometimes what our politics are about. But to remind ourselves of the humanity that connects us with ourselves and the planet that sustains us. And when we train healthcare workers over oceans, when we safeguard supply chains, whether we Co chair an international organization together or we spur green investments that give us hope for the future and jobs for our own children and their children. As we launch satellites that keep an eye on us from space, the lesson, I think is very clear and the message is very clear: think about a world without the U.S. India Partnership for a moment. Think about the children in Africa that will die because we never shared our vaccine technology. Think about what will happen when 40 percent of the climate change fight will happen here, the delta on carbon will happen right here in this country. If we weren’t able to bring technologies even more quickly from India to the United States and vice versa, to fight this fight.
But this has never been my fight to lead, it’s always been yours. I want you to think about what you do in that fight each and every day, whether you’re a private citizen, a business leader, whether you’ve committed yourself to public service inside government, whether you run a nonprofit or an association. That work isn’t something that is just one silo of work. Health, we forget about, until it affects us. We never do the proactive work – we see the doctor after the injury, he tells us to, or she tells us to, work out more often, control our diet and we say, OK, we’ll get to that. But whether it’s the planet or ourselves, let us be proactive in this work. And may you see yourselves as the leaders I know that you are, but I have witnessed and been inspired by and humbled to work alongside.
You know, we were filled with so many different experiences over the last two years, whether it was talking to residents in Mawlynnong, which is near Shillong – it’s the cleanest village in India – and I asked them what, what was the secret to creating such a beautiful village? And they said it was all about us realizing that this was our planet, that throwing something on the ground wasn’t somebody else ‘s responsibility but it was mine, and that we could make it interesting and fun, and that we could connect ourselves more with the very earth that birthed us, when we take care of her.
We went into a sacred forest also in Meghalaya where they talked about, the local tribal community talked about the centuries of people going into that forest to ask of the earth, in the toughest moments, and they connected the environment and the health when they said the midst of the COVID pandemic, we hadn’t been there for a long time, but we bathed ourselves, and purified ourselves, and we brought together the villagers, to go in there and to ask this planet to help us survive this moment that we didn’t know who would serve.
We all know the answers are out there – sometimes ancient, sometimes they’re brand-new waiting to be discovered, but that our bonds here as two great countries, cultural, economic, scientific and diplomatic. When people ask me, “Oh, there might be a fight in the news, or two commentators are saying are U.S. and India in trouble.” This is the most resilient relationship in the world and the most important relationship to continue growing in the world. From administration to administration, through party to different party, the U.S. and India, since the late nineties, have been building a model of why we have diplomacy, of why our people engage with each other, of why crossing oceans in this Indo Pacific is so critical, not only to the survival of our people and our countries, but of this very world.
I’ll close with one last story — I was in Kovalam, in Kerala, a little over a year ago. And staying at a beautiful hotel that was in a jungle that overlooks the water. And as I was getting ready to leave, the owners of the hotel, people, the managers of the hotel said, can you come and plant a tree? Having been a mayor, I have planted many trees, we planted one recently, at Agartala, the airport. I love planting trees, and I don’t just do it for the photo op — I know to massage the roots and make sure that it’s high enough, and it doesn’t die. But they asked us to plant a palm tree, a coconut palm, and they put a little sign there. Very embarrassed, I said you can take the sign away, but it said something like planted by his excellency Ambassador Eric Garcetti. And I said something, I said, “How long will it be ‘til the coconuts come from this tree?”
And they said, “Well, it’s about eight years. Ambassador, in eight years you can come back and see the coconuts come from the tree that you planted.” And I thought through – my daughter would be by then about 20 years old. [I would] come back with my family and be able to see just a small act that day of what it did to not only create something good for this planet, but to bear the fruit that we all need. May we each day, plant that coconut, may we each day, find a way to make things a little bit better, and I’m confident that the U.S.-India relationship is just like that planting, something that will continue to grow, something that will be resilient as we know the palm tree, the strongest storm can’t knock it down, the biggest wind can’t take it away. But that it will continue to provide not just for itself, but for the world around it, and that is our mission, my friends.”
Dhanyawad and may we protect our planet. Thank you so much.