Pravasi Bhartiya Divas

Asha had been invited to put up a booth at the recently concluded PBD. CII said that the focus of this year's PBD was philanthropy and would we participate. We said yes. Who knows we might get volunteers/funds/exposure...
Then things went haywire.
First they said we would be given a stall and it would cost us Rs10,000 assuming we get more donations than that.
Then they said that what we would get is a small booth and we would be given specific timings when we should be present.
Then they said that we need to be there at 9am.
Tuesday morning at 9am I do Eukaryotic Gene Transcription with M.Sc (IV semester). So two other volunteers went over to Vigyan Bhavan.
They were shown a shed. We will clean it, they promised, and you will share it with three other organizations.
Finally, Tarun did the only possible thing. He grabbed three tables, cleaned up the premise with Ravi, and set up Asha for Education banner. This is our place.
Well, for all the hoop-la, it was not only chaotic but CII needs to be taught the meaning of philanthropy. Not a single soul turned up.
The saving grace was the fact that I was on the panel on Challenges in Women empowerment due to a quirky turn of fate. I used the opportunity to talk about education and Asha. And we got couple of interested people stopping to talk to us about the status of education.
The panel was interesting: Mallika Sarabhai, Brinda Karat, Krishna Tirth, Girija Vyas, Meira Kumar, and Anu Peshawaria.
Mallika Sarabhai threw a slogan and left saying she had a performance in the evening.
Girija Vyas talked about Sita and Mirabai amongst other things. She also pointed out that the Chief Justice has never been a woman.
Meira Kumar rolled out the statistics. And both Meira and Girija Vyas took care to praise UPA as well as Rajiv Gandhi (They forgot to mention that he was the one who took that decision in Shah Bano case but as it is said in Hindi: Hota hai).
Brinda Karat was the most sensible. At least she talked about how in this whole NRI thing we manage to ignore the blue-collar workers especially women who have absolutely no support system abroad.
Anu Peshawaria, who also happens to be Kiran Bedi's sister, took care to mention that she had represented India in the Wimbledon and that Girija Vyas had give her many prizes. Then she publicized a book she had written that gives hotline numbers for women's organization. And she publicized it a bit more, some bit more, till Girija Vyas asked her to stop.
But the highlight of it all was when I was introduced to Sam Pitroda. He was boasting about his prodigious memory and how he gets more than 700 emails a day. Fortunately I was introduced by my first name. Who knows from my last name, given his memory, he might have deduced that he knew appa in the long gone days when he was part of C-DOT.