Speech!

Tomorrow evening I'll be giving a speech to the Rotary Club of Madurai. Wish me luck! Somehow or another I ended up in this situation. I just hope there aren't tons of people there. The speech is going to be in Tamil -- but spoken, not "pure" Tamil, so I hope they don't throw tomatoes at me. It's *possible* for me to read it in literary Tamil, but it will sound stilted as hell. Tamilarasi has been coaching me the past few days. My friend and fellow Tamilphile Costas and I once gave speeches, in literary Tamil (!), at a Pongal celebration held by Tamils living in central Pennsylvania. I was expecting 50 people or so but there were several hundred. I'm hoping that this function is smaller somehow. Otherwise I will be crazy nervous.

A few weeks ago I went to the upscale Milan store in Madurai to check out their "Drishti Collection." The idea behind this ad campaign is that the clothing is so fancy and awesome that you'll need to carry evil eye prophylactics around with you just to keep the evil eye off. A pretty awesome ad campaign to investigate for my research! I met the store owner who was super nice and really keen on getting me to speak Tamil at his "club." So a few days ago his lawyer and professor friend called me up and invited me to give this talk. I'm nervous but I think it will be good to meet some "high society people", as Tamilarasi calls them, because they tend to be quite concerned about mitigating the ill-effects of the evil eye, considering they've got plenty of property to defend.

I'm going to be wearing a sari from the "drishti collection" -- but sans the protective evil eye pumpkin. I might need a fire extinguisher, though, because the sari is so cool I'm sure it will burst into flames from all the drishti it's gonna attract.