The Messenger, Not the Message

Sometimes being a ghora in India is such a damn novelty that they have a hard time continuing about their business without stopping to take a picture or listening to what you're saying...

Case in point?

A day-long media blitz promoting advanced studies in the US and giving Indian students good information about the process. The public affairs people paired me with the US-India Education Foundation country coordinator, a Syracuse grad who sent her son to study in the US, too. We spoke with four newspapers, two english, two telugu. She did most of the speaking, as she's the professional advisor. I chimed in on the visa perspective: do your own personal research, don't rely on agents to do everything for you, prove that you're a credible student, separate yourself from the students who are more interested in working than getting a good education, don't rely on fake documents, etc. We ended the day with a televised session with a (small but cute) live audience.

The first article to come out?


"American Official...A Speaker of Pure Telugu"

The article starts off by bemoaning how Telugu-vallu go off to America and forget all their Telugu or come back with a poor accent, but here's an American who learned Telugu for 6 months by reading our newspaper (they were a bit boastful) and he speaks perfect Telugu.

This article may or may not win a Pulitzer Prize for truthfulness...

And how much of the article is dedicated to the student issues we were trying to present? Uh, none. But we're hopefully it might be included in a special section at a later date. Whoops.

Oh, and yeah. That IS my business card scanned into the newspaper of the second-most-widely-read telugu newspaper...