Working like a steer. (Or maybe not.)

I began working at my partner NGO this past week, and it is immediately apparent that working in India is not separate from living in India; things move at a different (often seemingly slower) pace, interacting and communicating with people takes somewhat large amounts of effort and patience, and even when you don't have a specific task, it's tiring.
I guess I might first clarify what it is that I'm doing here. I have been partnered with a non-governmental organization called Saloka, meaning amity in Hindi. The project's main goal is to promote communal harmony in Bombay through conflict resolution and peace education. I am set to take on a number of tasks while I'm here, but as of right now, I am simply reading materials on the history of the Hindu/Muslim conflict here in India, as well as reading evaluations and annual reports from my NGO to increase organizational knowledge and really wrap my head around what exactly it means to do conflict resolution work.
This is stimulating, but not quite as stimulating as going into the field today and observing a school visit conducted by the organization. I went with a number of people from Saloka to a secular Muslim girls school, where the main language spoken was Urdu, but the sessions were conducted in Hindi. As such, a lot of my energy was spent trying to understand the basic idea of what was happening in the sessions conceptually, aside from simply observing the way the group dynamic existed during the sessions. While I felt that my time was fruitful one way or another, (at the very least to increase my language skill) I'm excited to be doing English medium school visits in the next couple of weeks.
The definite high point of the day though was after a session ended, one class sang the Indian national anthem. After they were finished, a couple of the girls start whispering and looking at me. At this point I was used to getting this kind of reaction, as being a white male in a Muslim girls school is like wearing a flourescent green velvet tuxedo at a bar mitzvah. They continued to chat though, and then started to say something to the people from the organization. Apparently, they wanted to hear my own national anthem. I was shocked, embarrassed, and even somewhat honored all in the same moment. I hadn't sang the national anthem in probably over a decade, but somehow managed to come up with a reasonably listenable rendition of the star spangled banner for a group of 30 ten year old Muslim girls, after which they laughed and clapped emphatically. I blushed as they continued to laugh, and was told after that they loved it. One of the people from Saloka said that even though I was just observing from the sidelines all day, my presence there was important, if only for the students to see and relate to a foreigner. A famous physicist once said that you can't observe a situation without changing it, and I'm finding that in India I will have to find a way to observe with positive effects, even if it means more national anthems.