DC rally- Huge success :)

Just landed in Atlanta.

It went very well. People started arriving as early as 8 am. Everyone
yes I mean everyone who showed up got IV tshirts that shows the
american flag. We ran out of it after sometime.

Some members took initiative and started standing on the sidewalk on
two roads ( imagine L shape intersection) carrying placards and that
got good response from people driving by. Soon we had lot of IV
members following that :) Jamie reported Senator Kerry who was driving
by waved at us but we missed taking photos.

We started passing flowers and small american flags to people walking
by. Some time later when it was time to rally, CNN IBN showed up and
interviewed several members and of course Aman. Every state chapter
got their big state flag and combined with big U
US flags it was a sea of flags

Aman addressed the crowd and we started marching towards capitol
building. We marched on the road. We were given our own lane and we
didn't have to wait in the intersection when the light is red. So the
traffic was stopped while we went through the intersection. Mind you
it took a while for the huge crowd to go through and they stopped
traffic for that time.

When we reached capitol a stage was set with the capitol building as
backdrop. Startted with Abhijeet and others guitar and song. Jay
addressed the crowd and went on offensive, expect to hear from Lou
dobbs soon.

Rep. Jim Mcdermot address was good but he made the mistake of clubbing
legal and illegal issues together. Dr vivek gupta gave a very eloquent
speech. Mark's speech was very funny but thought provking. Sheela
murthy talked about her support for immigrant community and pointed
out how lawmakers make a mistake of combining our issues with
illegals. Finally Aman's speech was as usual inspiring. We ended it
national anthem sung very well by a IV member
(Sorry forgot the name) and abhijeet finished with a short poem. We also had Robert from Legal immigration Association representing chinese community talking about the contribitions from immigrants from both countries.

what a great team DC has. Sivakand, arun and the other team members
did an amazing work. At no point I saw chaos or problems. Such was
their coordination.

And forgot to mention. No one taunted as from the public and the cops
were very cooperative.

I will leave the rest to comment on the rally. I took tons of photos and will update them later tonight.

guyfromsg