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Regular-article-logo Monday, 27 April 2026

BRIGHT LITTLE BOY FROM BLIGHTY 

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BY MADHUMITA BHATTACHARYYA Published 01.09.00, 12:00 AM
Calcutta, Sept. 1 :     He's been to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, to 10 Downing Street to tell Tony Blair how to run the country better and now to Raj Bhavan for a rendezvous with the Governor of Bengal. Though 13-year-old Inderjivan Singh Samra thought all three were 'pretty cool', none was quite as cool as Millennium man Robbie Williams, whom he met briefly in London last year. On Friday morning, Viren J. Shah met the boy from Newcastle, featured in Children of Britain : Just Like Me, a book sponsored by Unicef that profiles 32 children from different ethnic backgrounds across the United Kingdom. Children... has been chosen as one of the 10 books to be kept in the Millennium Dome. 'Raj Bhavan is nice... I went all around,' said Indy, thrilled with the guided tour, and the Parker he was gifted by the Governor. But meeting heads of state is nothing new for Indy. He's met Queen Elizabeth three times and Prime Minister Blair twice. On his trip to Downing Street with the other chosen children last year, Indy passed on a tip or two to 'Tony'. 'I said I wanted to see less poverty, better welfare and better schools,' declares Indy. 'And I would have said the same thing to the Governor today if he had asked me. All countries basically have the same problems.' 'Cool' as the queen and her counsel were, they were not a patch on pop star and Unicef ambassador Robbie Williams, who who penned the forward for the book. 'We talked and I got his autograph, but he couldn't sing for us because we ran out of time,' recalls Indy. In the country for two weeks, the boy from Britain's sure he likes Calcutta 'better than Delhi and Mumbai' because 'it's friendly and my grandfather (Hari Singh) lives here'. Indy's mother would like him to take a year off to do social work, but he wants to 'go to university, specialise in IT and make big bucks'. The ultimate fantasy of the teenager balancing Tai-chi and tabla, however, is 'joining the Indian Army'.    
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