D!shoom!

This past weekend I went to a cultural festival at IIT, Indian institute of Technology. There was music, food, games, crafts, etc. I worked both days behind the peta booth with a vegan friend from school, Niranjin. (I am trying to spell names the best that I can assume but they will be wrong.) It was really surprising to meet him--he is in all of my classes-because most indians have never heard the term "vegan." I also met Arun and Shriram among others, who asked me thousands of questions about America but knew much more than I did about our culture and our politics. I should be better informed...Anyway so many are vegetarians here but still have a diet heavily influenced by dairy.  we set up the stall with signs, pamphlets and on sunday I brought my laptop to play videos. It was pretty slow because the festival was all day 10 to 10 basically and most people were sort of meandering. But sometimes we would have quite a few people come by. Most would look around and then say "what is all this?!" Then I would explain and their next question was often "well what can we do?" I can't tell you how refreshing that was! So nice. I think because so may people are already vegetarian due to religious beliefs and their diet isn't meat-based, they don't necessarily get defensive. Of course their were many people who were "non-veg" as they refer to it here, and certainly had opinions but were so respectful about giving us a chance to explain ourselves. I just can't believe how much better it felt to talk to people about vegetarianism and animal rights who were open to consideration. Many of them would tell us they still had more thinking to do but took many pamphlets and thanked us for our help. Amazing! Peta is relatively new here, it is call D!shoom, so many people haven't heard about it. I think in the US people have attached a stigma to peta because of some of their more extreme antics. They groups us as "crazy,""liberal," or "extreme" and rely heavily on their own religious beliefs as an argument. When your diet is primarily meat-basted it is hard for you to think about eating alternatively. And certainly more difficult to tell someone that you recognize that you are participating in the abuse, torture, and death of massive quantities of animals every day but still really don't care because steak tastes soo good. And come on, cheese?! Can't give that up. I will add pictures soon.