American India Foundation Has Big Night
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
So many hands went up so quickly, that auctioneer Sandhya Jain Patel, onstage at the Waldorf-Astoria on Wednesday night, could not keep track.
“Over there, the woman in the sari,” she said, forgetting in the chaos of the moment that almost every woman in the room was wearing a sari, each more beautiful than the next.
The hands in the air marked $1,000, then $5,000, then $100,000 contributions to the American India Foundation’s vocational training programs in India. By 2010, the foundation expects to train 100,000 youth, helping them increase their incomes between 75% and 100% .
The crowd was generous. So was the government of India, which agreed to match the auction proceeds. So was honoree Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries Limited, who agreed to donate double the proceeds. The final take, announced by gala co-chairman Rajat Kumar Gupta: $3.9 million.
