“We were in Bombay for like a week, same things; meetings with officials, business, culture, arts, government. Then we had like three days, four days, to reach Kashmir for the final three weeks of reflection. So now you’ve got the whole structure. Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Bombay, that’s it. There were sets of formal meetings so you understood bureaucracy, politics, economics and policies. We met with the planning board of India and this was back, this was Soviet type, this is the top — these are the guys of the whole country. They saw us as students because of Gaudino’s powers. Like nobody was asking to meet them. It was like a weird thing. I thought they were delighted.
I’ve got a picture at home of me shaking hands with the president of India, another occasion. It was on Republic Day, their July 4th. The day the country was founded. They have a big event and we had invitations as special guests of the President of India, which is an honorific position. So he arranged those and he was always at those sessions and he conducted himself just as he would back in Williamstown. We would ask questions and he would sometimes spark something if he saw that something wasn’t touched on. But then he wouldn’t particularly talk with us after the session. He didn’t regroup us and say, “Now let’s talk,” as he would have with a book. And I think he probably should have. He was experimenting and I think part
–Dale Riehl '72