The Indian Ambassador

We are having something called the International Education Week at UAB now. Today it was about India, we had to tell people all about our homeland :-) I think if we really wanted to tell them everything from the Indus Valley Civilization to Chandrayaan, it would have taken ages, so we did it the grad-student way...putting up posters and explaining them (which we are very good at!!).
I love presenting stuff, be it a poster or a statistics problem. I dont know why, but I JUST love presentations!!! Perhaps it's because I get to talk a lot and there are people around me who listen, that makes me feel good :-) Surely I get importance, and that slowly has boosted up my confidence in public speaking and all good stuff...anyway, that's not my point... the thing is that we showed stuff about India today...
We have a group of Indian students, AIS and frankly speaking, I dont like most of my team-members there. I dont know how, but miraculously yesterday evening we got along so well, just too well, and we worked fast, liked what we did and ended up with some gorgeous and colorful posters and display boards. Seriously they were fantastic!!!
What did we put on them?? Haha!!! We had monuments, landscapes, science and technology, with Chandrayaan and our Agni, Prithvi, Pinaka, Brahmos, and Aryabhatta, INSAT...oooh the names themselves make me feel so proud. I almost fluff up!!! In Sci-Tech we had pics of Dr. Kalam, J.C.Bose, Sir C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Homi Bhabha and of course Rakesh Sharma!!!
The other posters were of weddings and dances. The center poster had our "Satyameva Jayate" (truth alone triumphs) with the Lion Capitol, our Tricolor and some of our statesmen. I obviously put some pics of Netaji, and I wore Mission Netaji badge also :-)
We showed artifacts...handmade stuff...nice things and did a glamorous rangoli outside with sidewalk chalk!!! Kathleen helped me a lot in that. She even helped me wear a saree :-) She's GREAT!!!
I wore a blue saree...and I know I looked good in that :-) Many people came, my professors Dr. Sprague and Dr. Bangalore, Marcie my project manager, my friends from all over the globe, my friendship partners...so many people... I love it!!! The people who serve food at the international cuisine are so sweet. They treated me like a princess!!! My friends were also asking me to advise them about what to eat. The butter chicken was good but I dont know why they colored it red!!! Rice was good, the veggies were also good. Sheekh kabob got a bit messed up. They were more like meatballs than kabobs. Anyway, they did a great job!!! Trent couldn't pronouce "sheekh kabob" properly, he was fumbling and saying some weird sounding things, when I said, "If I can pronounce CHEESEBURGER, you have to pronounce SHEEKH KABOB !!" and he got it right in the next try!!!
It felt so nice...sitting there wearing a saree, eating Indian food, the song "yeh jo des hai tera" playing in the background and sharing my culture with my non-Indian friends!!! There was a warmth, not only of the golden sunbeams streaming across the place but also of a promise of friendship and love that will last forever!!!