June 9th, 2009 -- Last Day in Mumbai (Presentations, Trains, and Night Life)

This was our last day in Bombay. It was a hectic day as we still had a lot to do. Srin and Ramesh had presentations on the campus that afternoon. Ramesh being a professor there had a talk at the conference on campus and Srin was invited by Ramesh as a guest to talk about his work. Both of these fools are PhDs. I have to say, I was quite impressed with the presentations. Both of them held up the questions rhetoric very well and had the elite crowd eating out of their hands. As Srin would say, they "Rocked it!" and as Ramesh would say they totally "kicked their butts!"

I offered up my expertise as a presenter at the conference to Ramesh but apparently my topics were too advanced for such a conference so we decided it best for me not to present. And we'll keep it at that ;)

We rushed off to our next adventure for our last night in Bombay before we head out to the Himalayas.

All three of us have been heavily involved with Asha for Education (charity) for many years. (www.ashanet.org) Ramesh being one of the original members in Atlanta, Srin being a former Coordinator in Atlanta, and I being the most recent Coordinator in Atlanta, we all had a goal of visiting an Asha project up close to see with our own eyes how the work for fundraising in the US makes a difference to the projects in India that we work for. So we had coordinated a site visit of one of the schools in Mumbai that Asha supports to talk to the director and assess how the school is doing.

We were running late and it was almost dark. We rode the Indian local trains to get to the project … at night! People climb anywhere and everywhere and lean outside of the train as if it’s the safest dangerous thing to do in the world. I can’t image how it is during rush hour.

[NOW TO THE ASHA PROJECT] ....