Diplomatist Magazine Oman 2018 - Special Report | Page 40

PEOPLE OF OMAN AND INDIA
ARE CHANGE HARBINGERS
By Partha Roy Choudhary*
E
xpat Workers are the real yet
silent Ambassadors of the age-old
relationship between India and Oman.
For ages now, people-to-people ties and
individual contributions have been driving
this bilateral relationship. The present NRI
population in Oman is about 800,000,
including 45,000 students. Add to this the
almost 4,000,000 family members and ex-
NRIs who are now back home in India. From
the Omani side, there are hundreds of students
currently gaining higher education in India in
addition to the previous thousands who did
the same and are now back in Oman. This
total group of 5 million+ common people are
those silent Ambassadors.
People Skills – Yesteryears Glory
150 million years ago, as the Gondwana
land tectonic plates split and reshaped mother
Earth, India and Oman got thrown into a
40 • INDIA-OMAN • 2018
lifetime of companionship as the two banks
of the present day Great Arabian Sea.
The earliest Indian trading vessels
originating from the country’s 7,500 km
long western coastline and bound for the
west, made the 2,500 km long eastern
coastline of Oman as their natural fi rst port
of call. While Omani traders guided them
through land routes inside the vast Central
Asian markets, expert Omani navigators,
using their knowledge of Astronomy, guided
Indian ships further down south into the huge
land mass of Africa. Similarly, the Omani
trading Dhows bound eastwards would
make stopovers at Indian ports on its western
coastline and receive help from Indian traders
and sailors to either continue their journey
towards the interiors of India or mainly along
the coastline to the rest of south India, Sri
Lanka and, then, crossing the Indian Ocean
to pass through the strait of Malacca into the