St Paul, Minnesota - Second-generation Indian-American Sunita Krishna is a Hindu, political moderate and new law school graduate. She is also a member of the conservative Republican Party, serving as an alternate delegate from her home state of Arizona at the just- concluded presidential nominating convention in St Paul, Minnesota.
At the opening of the four-day meeting, Krishna took the main stage alone to lead 4,600 regular and alternate delegates and thousands of additional conventioneers in a peculiarly American ritual of patriotism - the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States: "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Invited a few days before to lead the pledge, Krishna said she was not nervous until she stood at the door leading onto the same glossy, black stage where Arizona Senator John McCain accepted the presidential nomination three days later.
"You can hear the crowd," she recalled, "and you kind of realize there's a lot of people out there."
For more than 20 years, conservative Christians have been the single largest constituency within the centre-right Republican Party. The convention in St Paul featured prominent, and sometimes fervent, prayer to open and close each day's session. On Thursday, a legendary football coach stepped on to the dais and for a few minutes delivered an almost entirely religious address.
Being a rare non-Christian Republican doesn't bother Krishna, whose parents are immigrants from India's information technology hub Bangalore.
"It's just a non-issue for me," she said. "I believe in God. The mention of God doesn't offend me."
While the Christian conservative wing of the party is often focused on its own moral agenda - such as opposition to abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia - Krishna describes herself as "more socially liberal, as a lot of young people are today."
Krishna is more motivated by economic and business issues, such as tax cuts and personal-injury lawsuit reform, and finds that the free- market, free-trade Republicans fit her political outlook better than the centre-left Democrats, who tend to impose more regulation on the economy and resort more readily to tax increases.
She grew up with politics around the dinner table, thanks to her mother, a college professor in political science. "In my house, we would sit down and watch the evening news and talk about the issues," the Arizona-born Krishna said.
After studying political science at university, she spent three years on Capitol Hill in Washington, working for Senate Republicans before starting law school.
Krishna sees a natural pro-business constituency in the Indian- American community, which has education levels above the US average and is disproportionately represented in medical professions and technology, and tends toward entrepreneurism in businesses such as hotels and software development.
"I think there's an amazing, hard-work ethic that's unique to immigrants," she said.
Krishna's father is a doctor, her sister is in medical school, and "my aunts and uncles are all physicians."
While awaiting her results from the bar exam, Krishna has already found a position with a law firm, defending doctors against medical malpractice lawsuits. "I start on Monday," she said.
