It was good to be back in India, Myanmar's iconic pro-democracy leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi said. The Nobel laureate, who spent her growing years in India, arrived here Tuesday on a six day visit during which she is to meet India's leaders as well as friends from her school and college days in Delhi. This is Suu Kyi's first visit to India in nearly 40 years.

Suu Kyi studied at the Convent of Jesus and Mary School and graduated in political science from Lady Shri Ram College, one of Delhi's most reputed colleges for women, when her mother was Burma's envoy to India. She is expected to meet students and the faculty of LSR in this visit. On the political level, she said she wanted closer relations between the people of the two countries because a gulf had emerged in recent years.

Suu Kyi and her mother, Suu Kyi's father was a friend of Nehru who lived in the 1960s on 24 Akbar Road, now the headquarters of the Congress party. Suu Kyi is also scheduled to meet Vice President Hamid Ansari, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid.

She will visit The Energy and Resources Institute in Gurgaon, before flying to Bangalore and Andhra Pradesh. India awarded Suu Kyi the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding in 1992 while she was under house arrest under the military government in Myanmar.

During Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Myanmar in May, Suu Kyi had spoken of the need for greater exchanges between the people of the two countries.