India: a country that is a continent
The Indian subcontinent has more than a billion, 170 million inhabitants. Its population could soon exceed China’s. It is a rapidly developing country with one of the biggest economies in the world. At the same time there is tremendous illiteracy, poverty and malnutrition. Its enormous religious variety includes the 80% Hindu majority and a 2.3% Christian minority. It is understandable that among the Focolare dialogues in process in this land, the most developed should be in the interreligious field, especially with Hindus. The Focolare Movement has been in India since 1980. Today there are centres in Mumbai, Bangalore, Goa, New Delhi which promote various activities: Mariapolises, monthly meetings for adults, families, and young people. In various cities – Vasai, Pune, Panaji, Margao, Vasco, Trichy – there are groups actively following the Focolare spirit. Various small social projects are flourishing around the Focolare communities. These are engaged in educating children, improving conditions for women, supporting families in difficulty, with support also being given from people in other places. The best know are ‘Ilanthalir’ (Tamil for tender shoots) in the South of India and in Mumbai ‘Udisha’ – the sun ray that announces the new dawn. Set up to ‘offer a practical response to the poverty around us’ they now look after about 2400 children and their families. There is a particular emphasis upon spreading the values of universal fraternity in the world of adolescents, reaching out to young people of all religions with various events, included ones of an international nature. 
The 2009 Supercongress – a meeting run by Youth for Unity – was held in Coimbatore, drawing together teenagers from across the planet. Many small but significant concrete ventures were also spoken of in the recent New Humanity meeting in Mumbai (September 2011). Among the participants was a doctor from Goa who had set up the mobile Prabhu Prasad Clinic offering various medical services for people of all ages. Chiara Lubich visited India two times, especially for dialogue with her Hindu brothers and sisters. This was after she had got to know Dr Aram, the founder of Shanti Ashram, at the World Conference of Religions for Peace. In 2001 in Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu) she received the ‘Defender of Peace’ prize from the Shanti Ashram together with the Sarvodaya Movement. She came back in 2003 to the Mumbai’s Somaiya Vidyavihar College. She had been asked to speak about her particular vision of unity and universal fraternity, which she did. After that there have been numerous discussion meetings, conferences, exchange visits and symposia – the last being in December 2011. These were all occasions of dialogue, steps ahead in building relationships of real fraternity with the Hindu world, as witnessed, for instance, by Dr Vijaya Bhatia, a yoga teacher, who spoke at the Fourth Hindu-Chrisian Symposium on the theme: ‘Reading, interpreting and living the Scriptures to being about peace and universal brotherhood’. 
It is an ideal for life made concrete in the day to day, as in the case of one young woman from Mumbai who chose to give someone in greater need than her the money she had struggled to raise to pay a very high medical bill. It was a huge surprise when that very evening she received a phone call from the hospital. They had discovered an error in her favour and they owed her 300 rupees! It is the experience of living the Gospel that has an effect not only in the private and personal sphere, but also in the social. Statistics can be frightening, but striving the be ‘the change you would like to see in the world’, as Gandhi taught, the seeds of fraternity can continue to grow.
In 2005 my house was submerged in water because of the heavy rains. After I came back, I did not know what to do because I did not have enough money to buy a new house. A few stations away even my cousin’s house was submerged only for a few hours and the damage was not so much. I thought to myself I cannot do anything for my house but at least I can help her. So I rang up a few of my relatives telling them that I would contribute to help my cousin: we collected Rs.50,000. She could not believe her eyes… To my surprise after a few days I got double the amount of money from some unknown source for my house! One night during the winter season I was cozy in my bed ready to go to sleep when I realized that there were many daily wage workers who do up the road sleeping out in the cold. I could no longer get sleep. I thought of the golden rule: ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. The next day I went to buy blankets for these people. I chose to buy the soft good ones instead of the hard cheap ones. Then I saw that there were many babies and small children among these people. I went to the nearby shop from where they bought things and I asked the shop keeper whether they bought any milk. The owner told me that they did but only for the very little ones and not for the older children and even the adults had tea without milk. I gave the shop owner money so that he could give all these people the milk that they needed and it has been over 3 years that I continue to do this. One day a patient came to me. She was a Hindu lady suffering from depression, with high blood pressure, sleeplessness, swelling of the body, obesity, etc. Going through her detailed story I understood that all her problems started the day her daughter married a Muslim boy. Since then she started rejecting her daughter. I could understand the suffering of this lady. When I was a child we suffered the partition of India and Pakistan. I was born in Lahore and with the partition we lost everything. We had to leave our home and come to India…however we cannot go on with the hate in our heart that we experienced in the past. 
Therefore I explained to this lady that since she had sown the seed of hatred in her soul, the result was a tree of hatred which was the root cause of all her problems. She had to forgive and sow the seed of love in her heart if she truly wanted to be cured. I thought she had understood and gave her some medicine. When she came back she was still with all her problems and I understood that she had done nothing about it. I understood that I had to do her part. So I took the phone, made her speak to her daughter and invite her and her husband to her place for dinner the same evening. After two months, as the relationship with her daughter and with her son-in-law got better her health improved too. One day I had the great joy to see them altogether in my clinic: it was like seeing a living piece in the mosaic of ‘universal brotherhood’. Witness told during the 
