Hi DK,
I'm looking forward to your meetup. I think meeting people of different backgrounds would be great!
I agree with drumbrake that native speakers can make language learning overly complicated. I studied Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in college and it felt like kidding to learn grade school grammar and all the basics of my own language before I realised TCSL is a serious discipline. As it is the rationale of certain grammatical phenomena can be too complicated to explain for somebody other than a linguist, involving all kinds of cultural, phychological, sociological...knowledge, and some of the possible explanations can be really unexpected. I personally find native speakers interesting perhaps because to me they can be good "objects of study" as well as people to learn from, as their brains function differently from mine, which always make me think a lot. As you're Indian I guess I will find you interesting too, since speakers of Indian English, Singaporian English, Chinese English and other variants think differently and we can always learn something form each other!