A proud Indian. Teaching English in a French classroom.
Charvi Arora grew up in Delhi, studied English at Dyal Singh College, Delhi University, and French at Alliance Française, Delhi, and then did something remarkable: she applied for — and was selected as — an English Language Assistant in France, through the French Embassy in India. Today she stands in a public school classroom in Lyon, helping French students master English.
But what makes her story genuinely extraordinary isn't the language she's teaching. It's everything else she brings into that room along with it.
India through her classroom.
Her Instagram series is titled Beyond the Stereotypes — India through my classroom. That title alone tells you everything about how Charvi approaches her role. French students, like most people who haven't visited India, arrive with a version of it built from scattered images and secondhand impressions. Charvi has made it her mission to replace that version with the real thing.
She's taught them about Indian classical music — not the one clip they'd already heard, but ragas, instruments, the depth of a tradition they had no idea existed. She brought them Kathak, Bhangra, Bharatanatyam, Garba. One student said, "Dance in India is so energetic!" She couldn't agree more. She walked them through Indian cuisine and watched biryani, naan, and chicken tikka masala produce instant recognition in a room that thought they didn't know Indian food. She explained that India has 22 official languages — and when a student asked, "Madame, do you speak all 22?" she laughed and said India's diversity is too vast to fit in one person, and that's what makes it so extraordinary.
She wasn't just selected. She was trusted.
In 2025–2026, Charvi was selected as an Ambassador from India at France Education International in Paris — honored alongside a cohort of international educators representing their home countries on a global platform. She described it as an opportunity to contribute, learn, and create global impact.
That's not the language of someone doing a job. That's the language of someone living a calling. The selection didn't make her an ambassador — she already was one. The programme just gave it a name.
She teaches English. But she teaches India too.
There's a version of language teaching that stays inside the textbook — grammar exercises, vocabulary lists, reading comprehension. And then there's what Charvi does. She uses the English lesson as a vehicle for something larger: genuine cultural exchange, mutual curiosity, and the slow dissolution of the assumptions people carry about places they've never been.
When she told her class about sleeper buses in India, they were genuinely shocked — and wished France had something like that. When she talked about Pondicherry, the French town in India where traces of French culture still linger, the room connected two worlds it hadn't thought were connected at all. When she introduced them to Bollywood, some of them already knew "Bole Chudiyan." The classroom erupted.
That's what teaching looks like at its best: not a transfer of information, but a conversation between worlds.
The world needs more teachers like this.
There is a version of cultural exchange that stays polite and surface-level — a few facts, a photo, a national dish. Charvi goes nowhere near that version. She goes deep, with the warmth and confidence of someone who genuinely loves where she comes from and genuinely wants the people in front of her to understand it.
Her students in Lyon are learning English. But they're also learning that India is not one thing. That it is twenty-two languages and seven days of wedding celebrations and sleeper buses and classical ragas and festivals every single day. That the country they thought they knew is infinitely more interesting than the version they'd been given.
That's not a lesson. That's a revelation. And Charvi delivers it every single day.