GRD School of Business, Coimbatore, India – Jan 2019

Ben had performed Voices of Men at GRD before, and the thoughtful, kind and creative Dr. Krishnakumar Ramachandran took things to a higher level for Ben’s return. Not only was Ben performing for 1270 (!) college students, but Dr. Ram also arranged for him to talk about gender-based violence at the morning assembly for the GRD elementary school. For the full VOM performance, Dr. Ram had the stage covered in gigantic canvasses with Ben’s “Austin Powers” image, and arranged a “Best Tweet” contest for the students to live Tweet during Ben’s performance what they were learning. Finally, Ben and I spoke to a smaller group (maybe 150) of middle school students. Ben included role-plays where he pretended to harass me on Indian public transportation. Students took turns practicing bystander intervention, yelling at Ben’s character to stop in English, Hindi and Tamil.