Brilliance
Chris LaMountain, Yasawini Iyer, and Supriya Pandit at the Fulbright Conference in Kochi.
One of my favorite things about the young Fulbright-Nehru Student researchers is their curiosity and their ability to be friends with people decades older than them! Plus, they all seem to be fluent in Hindi. Plus, they are generally brilliant. I was lucky to have a number of this gang residing in Delhi while I was there, and they were wonderful friends.
A highlight of the Fulbright experience is the 3-day South and Central Asia conference, which in 2023 was held in Kochi, in the state of Kerala in southern India. It was a sea of fascinating, adventurous people, with Fulbright Scholarships, from Fulbright-Nehru Student Researchers (a misnomer, really, because they had finished their degrees and then some by the time they got their Fulbright grant) to Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence in Teaching and/or Research, to Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation, to Fulbright-Kalam Climate Fellowship. Fulbrighters from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan attended.
The scholars presented on their Fulbright projects which ranged from political science to environmental science to religious studies. I attended sessions on gender representations in India media, gender in local rural politics, climate change and health, the stories of partition, a path to peace and the sarvodaya ashram, the devotional music of the Lotus temple, dargahs in contemporary India, and family life in Rajastan during Covid-19. I was fortunate to chair the first-ever teacher’s roundtable so those of us navigating culturally different classrooms, institutions and curriculum, had a place to compare notes and share strategies.
We even got a night of culture with jokes, traditional Indian dance Bharatnatyam, Garhwali folk song, amazing singing of many types, and Swang-Nautanki folk opera.
South and Central Asian Fulbrighters at the Kochi Conference in Februaruy 2023!
Although the entertainment and presentations were spectacular — upping my geo-political awareness by 1000% — probably my favorite part of the conference was having the opportunity to learn about the lives and work of so many brilliant people.
