The Community and Culture at Carnegie India
About the author: Raina Talwar Bhatia ’25 is an FSI Global Policy Intern with Carnegie India. She is currently a student at Stanford University majoring in Bioengineering and International Relations.
My last few weeks at Carnegie India really snuck up on me. The time just flew by and as it gradually came to an end, I truly was sad to leave behind the incredible friends I had made there. Between lunches at the office and outings with the team at a cafe nearby, in just a few weeks, I genuinely came to adore the community and camaraderie at Carnegie.
My fondest memories at the office often occurred between the hours of 1:00 to 3:00. Lunch was an amazing event with conversations ranging from reviews of recent Bollywood and Hollywood movies to discussing the international implications of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. The team’s official lunch was between 1:00 to 2:00, but of course, getting back to work immediately after lunch is statistically and more importantly, physically impossible.
Therefore, it was between 2:00–3:00 pm that the entire team engaged in team-building activities such as discussing the best restaurants in the area and the most important dishes to order there and loudly expressing their views and emotional state after a recently concluded game of basketball/cricket/tennis. It is hard to describe how welcoming and relaxed the atmosphere was in those moments. Of course, eventually, a senior research analyst would walk through the door and everyone would return to their work.
