Conference - I wanted to share my joy

For the last seven months, I have worked towards organizing an International Conference. Now I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal to many, but it was by far the biggest challenge I have faced in my professional life that’s all of five years.
Never realized how much planning goes behind such an even and even when I did realize it, I didn’t have a clue where to begin.
This is where my boss comes in. Though I fibbed through my interview I think that kind man saw through it all, and hired me thinking she’ll be cheerful and nice to have around a host of other stodgy people who will actually handle the conference.
Though I thought myself to be an independent sort of a person, after 2 weeks into this job I realized that I was following a pattern. I did what I was told to do, no more no less. I was good at following requests (nobody gets away with trying to order me), but there was no initiative from my side. I wouldn’t sit and think about the possible problems one could face, and have backup plans ready. Coz you see, other experts had been called in, and they promised in usual Indian style “Tussi Fikar Na Karo Ji, just leave everything to us”. Being a product of this country should have taught me a thing or two about the above mentioned statement, in utter desperation, I chose to take it at face value. This conference was voluntary work for them, so it wasn’t their main priority, and slowly it became very clear that the entire responsibility for the conference is gonna rest on our shoulders, My Boss and Mine.
He told me to take initiative, and since I follow what’s expected of me, I did. My boss, Dan, is the best person anyone could work for. He used to express appreciation at every little effort from my side. If I made a decision that was not probably the right one to make, he would stand by me and tell others who’d breeze in once in two months, to live with it, as they were not present to help me out when there was time. And if my workload is too much, like I needed to make reports, send 75 emails, and personally type out and print 125 copies of a letter and put it in envelopes, he would be sitting on the ground with me and writing down the addresses, and stapling the envelope shut.
Suffice to say, he made me make decisions, take responsibility and if and only if I stumbled would he come forward and help out. After spending 4 years of my career doing what sixty other people were doing along with me, the fact that in this job everything rested on me, that I was the only one doing the job that I did, arranging for visa, housing, airfare, invites, for 200 people, most of them from 8 different South Asian countries, and from America, and arranging everything from conference venue to menu, transport, audio visual equipment, changed quite a few of my fundamental perspectives about life. I learned how to haggle, bargain, stand my ground, I learned a lot.

Seven months passed by in a haze, and suddenly the conference was on us. I was staying on at India Habitat for a week to be at hand at any time there was a problem. The magnitude of what I had achieved by putting this conference together was realized on the first day of the conference, when around 160 people, renowned academics, senior journalists, people who were well known in their countries for their position in the government, all of them, gave me an ovation and the designated leader of from each country gave me a vote of thanks. I missed it of course, I was outside working out another query. But one Pakistani gentleman took me by hand to the conference room and introduced me to everyone, who previously thought that I was a boy, or a middle aged woman. Most of them came up to me and told me that they certainly hadn’t imagined me to be a tiny bint of a girl, and that were amazed that I had carried of this success. I have never been happier in my professional adult life. And all this was thanks to this one Prof Dan Berman, who taught me the importance of trusting myself.