Mind Reading

The whole hall was looking packed... and why not??? It was our hard work which had paid off... it was Mrs Jaywanti Kulkarni who was going to speak there today... Mrs Jaywanti Kulkarni was a great historian who had done extensive research on Mousuni – ‘the girl with the midas touch’ as they called her... Mousuni was a girl from the remote village of Bangwa located near Chandrapur, which housed a very remote adivasi tribe, the Joris... Mousuni was the first girl from the Jori tribe who in 1980 had defied all odds that the women of such a remote tribe usually faced and successfully passed the IAS examination and become a Collector... whatever projects or activities done by Mousuni were successful and that led her to be called as the ‘Girl with the midas touch’...

Mrs Kulkarni had taken upon herself to bring the whole life of this wonderful girl to the society so as to motivate others... she used to conduct seminars all over India and had successfully motivated many... her lecture were sought after.... but the thing here was that this was her 4 th lecture in recent times in our city and this time it was difficult to gather women to listen to her... but i alongwith members of my NGO had successfully gathered a good crowd for her seminar...

As the crowd settled in we went on the dias and the talk started... i had already heard her 3 times in recent times and somehow had byhearted her talk till now... as she took the podium and started her talk i seemingly drifted away from the lecture... already knew what she was going to speak... i started observing the crowd... it was almost a full female crowd except for a couple of men who probably were present to ferry back their spouses after the lecture...

I started observing the faces of different women and started examining their expressions... women of all ages were present... i started wondering what must these women be thinking right now??? I wished i could read the mind of all these women so as to know what they thought about the lecture... the expressions varied from a stark expressionless face to a smiley one to a grossly angry one... as i