The glorious “Carabinieri” army force is a military police force in a permanent public security service.
Manraj is 24 years old, a fair-faced man with honest expression, and in his course at the Reggio Calabria Cadet School he beat all his Italian counterparts, getting first rank and deserving a mention from the Minister of the Interior. “He had an average performance that placed him on top of all the other students, with excellent results in all military and vocational subjects,” says the proud captain of his School, Colonel Davide Rossi.
Manraj is the son of Indian immigrants who arrived in Italy some thirty years ago from the Punjab region, where most of the approximately 150,000 Indians living in our country come from, an excellent and proud example of successful integration and ethical immigration. Born in Anzio, in the province of Rome, around 10 years old he moved to Veneto in San Dona di Piave, with the father, welder, and the mother who was a teacher of languages at home. Manraj has recently got a diploma in electrical engineering and he is now studying to graduate in Engineering.
His true passion has always been to become a Carabiniere: “I have always been attracted to the Army since childhood,” he says. “Becoming a carabiniere was one of my dreams, but a real conscience came only after I finished high school.” Moreover, there is a long tradition of Sikh in the armed and security forces, both in India and within the huge Indian community in Great Britain and the rest of the world.
The values of fairness, loyalty and respect are bound to the Sikh religion, as Manraj had pointed out some time ago: “I am Sikh, a religion in which it is important to live in society, it teaches us solidarity. I am always committed to get the maximum, I do not set goals, I try to live the day and hope to get as high as possible.”
Manraj is of course an Italian citizen since he was 18 years old. “It was a formal recognition of a path. If a person grows in Italy, certain values should become inevitably part of his baggage.”
He sees his dream come closer and closer, though he now minimizes: “What I have accomplished is at everyone’s reach.” The fact that he was brought as example by Minister Marco Minniti, who was present in Reggio Calabria last June at the oath of Manraj and his 364 colleagues, honored him, but he does not lose his humility: “It can be a great message for the new generations of foreigners.”
Source: Il Giornale