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.

The most poignant part of Steinem's speech was devoted to her late mother. Ruth Steinem, a reporter, wrote under a male pseudonym because "she was living in an era in which the popular wisdom said a lady's name appears in a newspaper only when she is born, when she marries and when she dies". Steinem senior rose to the pioneering position of the Sunday editor of the Toledo Blade. But she eventually succumbed to social expectations and gave up her journalistic career, with "great penalty to her spirit". Steinem retraced her earliest memories of being taught by her mother how to fold a piece of paper into thirds across and then numbering those thirds so she could print in 6 columns. "It was that lovingly folded paper and her insistence on the importance of words and going to the dictionary, and her anger at some political leader who didn't get his facts straight. All of that told me how important journalism was." Steinem paid a touching tribute to her mother's spirit by devoting the medal to her.

Playboy Bunny. Cult feminist. Bestselling author. Ms. editor. Activist accused of having CIA connections. Woman who married at 66 after declaring that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Style icon at 70 plus. I was well versed with Steinem lore long before we met. Indeed, little about the septuagenarian actually came as a surprise when I met her in flesh and blood. But something about the encounter struck a personal chord and made me revisit my copy of Outrageous Acts. That old college connection, perhaps.