Young people will chart the course of the future: Obama at Town Hall

NEW DELHI: Former US president Barack Obama said on Friday that the India-us relationship could be a “defining partnership of the 21st century” and charting the course for the future will also depend on the young people of the two countries.

At a Town Hall organised by the Obama Foundation where he addressed young leaders from India, he said the single most important thing he wanted to focus on was training the next generation of leadership.

With its largest young population in the world, India holds an important place for him, he said.

Both India and the US are hugely diverse and have many common shared values, he said.

He believed that the relationship between the two countries can be a “defining partnership of the 21st century”, he said.

“I also believe that charting the course for that future is going to depend on young people.”

To a question from a transgender woman who rued discriminatory laws in India, Obama said he would not get into specifics of local laws but advised her to find her voice and tell her stories so that the perception that she was different was broken down.

When he was in college, Obama said, many US states had discriminatory laws against lesbian and gay communities. Now, even many conservatives acknowledge people should not be discriminated against due to their sexual orientation, he said.