With love to a Miranda House sister'.The words scribbled on the back page of a tiny notebook - for lack of a better ready substitute then - are special to me because they were penned by a very remarkable ex-Mirandian. That Gloria Steinem spent two years in India and was influenced by Gandhian ideals before she became a golden girl is well documented. But picturing her as a 20-year-old on a wintry Delhi morning, sipping milky ginger tea in an MH dorm yielded a startlingly vivid portrait of the icon in her Delhi University days. I found myself airborne on such flights of imagination when I met her in person in 2005 as a research assistant at the Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, a small Midwestern town straddling Kansas City and St. Louis.

Steinem was invited by MSJ, the world's first journalism school, to be felicitated with the coveted Honor Medal Award. Accompanying her were three close feminist friends, Farai Chideya, Suzanne Levine and Amy Richards, all well-known names in the American media and publishing world. The event was definitely a big deal in our part of the cornfields. As a lowly R.A., I had been summoned to organise press and publicity for the event and sessions for J-school students. And yes, to design bookmarks with Steinem's quotes for the event.

My first memory of the icon is that of a petite, almost tiny lady, in large sunglasses getting off an SUV, triggering the flash of a dozen cameras. It could be Hollywood but we were really in a tiny back alley in Columbia that provided ready access to the green room of the Missouri Theatre, the venue of the awards ceremony. As college guide-usher-PR-bodyguard rolled into one, it was my privilege to escort her backstage before the function. The old college connection surfaced almost immediately. I was rewarded with a warm hug the moment Steinem discovered we shared a common alma mater. She spoke about her time in India with great warmth, recalling things in graphic detail. She asked about feminist magazine Manushi and about new organisations working at the grass roots.

A stunning orator, Steinem held the packed-to-capacity auditorium spellbound. Brushing off the dean's lavish praise with trademark wit and grace, she joked "This is as good as being able to listen to your own eulogy, but you don't have to die!" In the course of the evening, she went on to highlight the many challenges faced by American journalism. America, she said was suffering from a "real deep information". The culprits: media obsession with celebrity, corporate pressures on editorial, "our own King George 2nd getting his way with the media an awful lot of time," a majority of television journalists coming from right- wing think tanks.