ISW participated again this year in the “Spirit of Shrewsbury Fall festival”.  We had an ISW booth at the Oak Street middle School Expo.  In spite of a rainy day, we had a very good turnout of visitors at our booth.  It was a lot of fun interacting with our Hometown Community.  The “Hometown” of our “India Center”.

It was a pleasure to see the interest that the visitors took in the little- something’s we had to offer at our booth especially the young children.  Our IYG members did a great job in doing Mehndi almost nonstop.  It was amazing to see them so intensely involved in creating those intricate designs with Henna.

This year we tried a new thing: we offered to show visitors what their names will look like when written in an Indian language.  Lot of young visitors wanted to try it out. We prepared name tags for them which had their names written both in English and Hindi.  They really enjoyed the phonetic alphabets of Hindi and wore those name tags with a smile.  It was like a chain reaction, they kept bringing their friends for more.  Same kind of chain reaction happened with our “Bindi” tryout.  Just like last year, Samosas and Bindi’s were a hit again.  Sushila Pathalam and Parth were great in interacting with the visitors.

We got to hear one unusual story, which tells us how much some of our neighbors are interested in knowing more about us and India.  This one gentleman told us that one evening their family dressed in some symbolic Indian clothes and his wife dressed in a Sari and prepared an Indian meal.  Each member read something about India and narrated it to other members of the family.  We got to exchange some facts about our culture with him.  A warm and friendly exchange.
Because of the lack of participation from our members, during past two years, this year ISW did not participate in the Parade which was scheduled for Oct. 2nd.

There were close to 100 exhibitors including the art and craft booths at the expo.  In spite of the rain, a few thousand visitors showed up. As the organizers describe it, this expo is a celebration of Shrewsbury town’s civic, educational and religious organizations and its business community.  Since Shrewsbury is the home town of our India Center and home of a large population of ISW members, we participate in this festival to show our community spirit.

If you have not done so yet, don’t forget to check out our ISW fall festival banners on the Main Street Shrewsbury and on route 9, while you are driving by.  We are referring to the blue and green banners hung over the light poles throughout the main St., Oak St. and route 9 in Shrewsbury.   We also had our name “India Society of Worcester” printed on the official Spirit of Shrewsbury Fall Festival T shirts.  These T Shirts were worn by many at the parade and were on sale at the Expo.

Hope some of you got to participate in it.