'The resilience of the Indian people is unparalleled'

As part of an ongoing series, we bring you stories of young Indian Americans who came looking for the Real India and found their real selves instead. Kiran Sarabu recounts her trip to India.

Kiran Sarabu, a recent graduate from George Washington University with a bachelor's degree in economics, is pursuing a master's in applied mathematics at Hofstra University, New York. Sarabu, who grew up in Montville, New Jersey, worked as an intern at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors where she conducted research on credit union stability.

Daughter of a lead researcher at a pharmaceutical company and a mother who is a bank executive, Sarabu has been training in Carnatic music for over a decade. With her interest in finance, classical music and travel, she was a natural for the Bharat Yatra travel grant:

At the end of this year's Bharat Yatra to Rajasthan, I knew I had made memories that would last me a lifetime. My fondest memories of the yatra are of the time I spent with 13 fellow yatris who had the same excitement for adventure and the motivation to cross borders to learn and share their experiences.

We spent every waking moment with each other; never had I been in an environment where company was in such abundance. Together we road tripped across Rajasthan's desert terrains, sharing stories, aspirations, laughter, tears, singing, dancing, reading, writing, discussing and reflecting.

There is nothing like laughing so hard that your stomach hurts, which is exactly what happened on the jeep ride through the Bishnoi village during a rain storm.

There's nothing like being encouraged by your peers to overcome a physical feat of hiking 510 meters to reach the Saraswati temple at the top of the Ratnagiri hill in Pushkar and then sharing a moment of silence to admire the breathtaking view. There is nothing like feeling as free as a child when you are playing in the sand dunes of the Thar desert.

Equally memorable are the daily struggles of the people living in poverty that we witnessed.

We met people facing adversities that we couldn't imagine, yet their spirits were not broken.

At an organisation we visited in Jaipur, I met a woman who traveled from Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, with her husband in hopes of getting a prosthetic leg for him from this organisation.

The Jaipur Foot institution provides these prosthetics free of charge. She said to me in Telugu, "His leg is not going to grow back and he has too much energy to sit idly, we just had to do something." She also told me she spent more than she could afford working as a house maid to make the long train trip to Jaipur. I will never forget her strong will and her faith that something can always be done if you willfully try.

Throughout the journey, I was reminded of how people with limited resources still try to make a meaningful life for themselves and their children. I admired their resilience. They surely were not happy at all times, but they would not be kept down.

The journey created a tangible definition of what it is to be a 'developing' country, while engaging in different communities and understanding how people are unleashing their potential. We could also observe that in some areas people were lacking the resources to optimise their productivity. Every single day of the yatra was a vibrant enlightenment of the way most of the world lives and the resilience of the Indian people is unparalleled to anything I had ever seen before.

The last day felt like getting off a rollercoaster, feeling a little dizzy, waiting for perspective to come into focus, wondering what do I do with all these things I have learned and all these emotions I feel? I am still trying to formulate an answer, but I do know that I will never forget this journey and the people I made it with.