{"id":8504,"date":"2009-11-28T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-28T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/11\/28\/india-shines-at-obamas-state-dinner\/"},"modified":"2009-11-28T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-28T12:00:00","slug":"india-shines-at-obamas-state-dinner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/11\/28\/india-shines-at-obamas-state-dinner\/","title":{"rendered":"India Shines At Obamas&#8217; State Dinner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/11\/25\/us\/politics\/25dinner.html?_r=1&#038;emc=eta1\">www.nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>WASHINGTON, DC, USA, November 25, 2009: It is an old tradition, a White House dinner governed by ritual and protocol that happens to be this city&#8217;s hottest social event. But at their first state dinner on Tuesday night, President Obama and his wife, Michelle, had with distinctive touches.<\/p>\n<p>They invited local students to witness the arrival of the guests of honor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, and presented a melange of musical entertainment, including A. R. Rahman, the Indian composer who wrote the score to the movie &#8220;Slumdog Millionaire.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He wants to set a tone that&#8217;s different,&#8221; Vishakha N. Desai, a dinner guest and the Indian-born president of the Asia Society, said of the president.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Obama greeted his guests in Hindi and hailed the contributions of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., saying that such &#8220;giants&#8221; are &#8220;the reason why both of us can stand here tonight.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The guest list included the directors Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan, the writer Jhumpa Lahiri, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican, and Indra Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo.<\/p>\n<p>There was White House honey and sage from the garden and a menu that gave vegetables and beans &#8212; including eggplants and lentils &#8212; top billing. For a White House keen on promoting fresh fruits and vegetables, what could be more serendipitous than a guest of honor who happens to be a vegetarian?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: www.nytimes.com WASHINGTON, DC, USA, November 25, 2009: It is an old tradition, a White House dinner governed by ritual,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}