Delhi law faculty

Today I had to give a presentation on the Global Climate |Campaign to the Law faculty of Delhi university something I had been dreading for an entire week. I absolutely loath public speaking,which does not make me so dissimilar from the average Joe public, apparently when quizzed people in the UK voted getting up and speaking in front of an audience as their number two fear after death.

Well in order to lighten things up, we had just been subjected to AL Gore's an inconvenient truth I cracked a joke about how my sister had fallen asleep whilst watching the movie, too many graphs she had professed. I remarked how relieved I was that none of the students had dozed off during the viewing of the film ..... dead silence you could have heard a pin drop and a stern and disapproving look from the head teache; not the best start to a lecture I thought to myself but I pressed on with my speech regardless, trying to look as non plussed as possible. To make matters worse, whilst I had been waiting in the common room the teacher in question had approached me and we had had an informal conversation about this and that. Nobody had thought to forewarn me that indeed she was the head teacher or that she would be introducing me for the debate. My guard down I revealed that I had dropped out of University because I thought it was dull (ouch!) and that I had subsequently studied fashion and art and was thinking of retiring from campaigning pretty soonish. In India a university degree is what the educated lot judge you on, one of the first things people ask you is what subject you have studied? ..... so dare I say she wasn't too impressed by my resume. Nevertheless she gave me a very "colorful"introduction and I went ahead with my preprepared speech trying to lend it as much gravitas as possible. My friends assure me it went well but of course they would wouldn't they ....bless them!

My talk was followed by a professor going into great depths about the Kyoto protocol, to be honest it was way too technical for me and I switched off. All in all the students were very enthusiastic about the campaign. A lot of them previously unfamiliar about climate change are now very keen to spread awareness, so all in all I think the evening was a success.

Rather embarrassingly for me the students ordered a chauffeur driven car to drive me home, they meant well but it was a huge four by four, as George Mombiot so rightly said ....... show me an environmentalist and I'll show you a hypocrite.

Tomorrow we are rolling out our awareness programme across 10 Delhi colleges luckily I needn't do any further presentations. Hallelujah ! Mind you after tonight's experience I feel pretty confident.... lets hope see if it lasts.

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