The IIC Experience is now five years old.  First organized in 2004, the India International Centre’s annual festival has come a long way from those hesitant days. What is distinctive about this festival is the sheer range it presents - dance, music, theatre, films, exhibitions and special cuisine and IIC’s fine open air spaces are the venues for most of these events.

The India International Centre was a project conceived after a discussion in 1958, between Dr.S. Radhakrishnan, who was then Vice President of India, and John D. Rockefeller III. The Founder President of the IIC, Dr. C. D. Deshmukh, wrote of the Centre as a place for ‘exemplars of various cultures (to) stay together for a while… in order that the sharpness of intellectual exchange is softened by the graciousness of good fellowship’. Complementing and concretizing this vision are the superb architectural creations of Joseph Allen Stein that flow alongside the historic and magnificent Lodhi Gardens. It is a matter of some pride that the Centre has, for over four decades substantially lived up to its promise, becoming over the years a place for discourse, debate, and the total range of cultural activities, while providing space for quiet reflection and research.

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