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Bidens to greet India’s Modi with lotus flowers, but no Gujarati food

PressNewsAgency
By PressNewsAgency
Bidens to greet India’s Modi with lotus flowers, but no Gujarati food

(1/6)A plate is shown as US First Lady Jill Biden gives a media preview ahead of Thursday’s state dinner as part of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official visit to the United States , in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., June 21, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) – President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a White House decorated with peacocks and lotuses on Thursday, hosting a vegetarian but non-specialty dinner from Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

Modi, a strict Hindu who follows a vegetarian diet, will be served a first course that includes a salad of grilled corn kernels and an avocado chutney, the White House said.

The main course will include portobello mushrooms and creamy saffron-infused risotto, with rose-cardamom infused strawberry shortcake as dessert.

Dining with a slight Indian accent, the Bidens continue the White House tradition of serving guests from abroad food that has a slight echo of home with a strong American bent. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s state dinner in 2009 included basmati rice, but also White House-grown arugula and pumpkin pies.

About 400 guests will dine at Modi’s event in a pavilion set up on the South Lawn of the White House, featuring Apple (AAPL.O) CEO Tim Cook, Google of Alphabet (GOOGL.O) CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft (MSFT.O) CEO Satya Nadella and FedEx (FDX.N) CEO Raj Subramaniam is likely to attend.

“With this official state visit, we are bringing together the oldest and largest democracies in the world,” Jill Biden told reporters in a preview of Wednesday’s dinner.

The evening’s entertainment will include American violinist Joshua Bell and Penn Masala, a South Asian a cappella group from the University of Pennsylvania.

The décor will feature elements of American and Indian culture, including images of the peacock and bald eagle, the American and Indian national birds, respectively.

The tables will be festooned with lotus flowers, revered in Indian design and a symbol of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Reporting by Jeff Mason and Nandita Bose; Edited by Heather Timmons and Sonali Paul

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Thomson Reuters

Jeff Mason is a White House correspondent for Reuters. He has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden and the presidential campaigns of Biden, Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. He served as president of the White House Correspondents Association in 2016-2017, leading the press corps in defending press freedom in the early days of the Trump administration. His work and that of the WHCA were recognized with the Deutsche Welle “Freedom of Expression Award”. Jeff has asked direct questions of domestic and foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He is a winner of the WHCA’s “Excellence in Coverage of Presidential News Under Deadline Pressure” award and a co-winner of the “Breaking News” award from the Association of Business Journalists. Jeff began his career in Frankfurt, Germany as a business reporter before being posted to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. Jeff appears regularly on television and radio and teaches political journalism at Georgetown University. He graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and was a Fulbright Scholar.

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