What did Bill have for Dinner??

On his way to Cuddalore (see following post), Bill Clinton landed up in Chennai, capital city of the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu, in his private jet, a little past midnight, and checked into a one of the best 5-Star hotels in the city. Here's what he/his entourage ordered for dinner:

Kozhi Varatha (South Indian Chicken Curry)
Kozhi Jeerakam (fried cumin-flavored chicken)
Idiappam (a rice-based, stringy pancake-- quite yummy!)
Diced Chicken in Oyster Sauce (Chinese)
Beef in Soya Sauce (-do-)
Tenderloin in Burnt Garlic Sauce (-do-)
Dry Sliced Chicken (-do-)
Hakka Noodles (-do-)
Stir Fried Vegetables (-do-)

Quite a feast!

Bill's Back, and Happy

Over a year past his last visit, Bill Clinton was back in South India to review the progress of the tsunami relief effort. And he was happy. The small town of Thazhanguda, a fishing village in Cuddalore, one of the tsunami's worst-hit areas, was a model for replication. "I want to figure out how to make this part of the UN strategy for future disaster management", said Mr. Clinton. "This is a good model for economic diversification and housing construction, not only for places devastated by natural disaster but also where poor people have sub-standard housing and not much economic opportunity. What is being done here, I would like to see copied throughout the world." Housing was very important and "the hardest thing to do". Even in Florida, a year after the Hurricane, people were living in tents.

"Cuddalore could be proud that it had covered the 'last mile' in early warning systems and disaster preparedness".. The Hindu

Collector Gagandeep Singh Bedi came in for praise.. the Cuddalore success story was "an unusual partnership - national funding and regional leadership under this good man here".

Bill also visited the house of Mayilvail, a fisherman, and witnessed a mock disaster-perparedness drill. He broke protocol to reach out and touch the locals who had gathered in strength to see him.

Bill Clinton is impressed.. and impressive

Appreciating India for its tsunami relief effort, former US President and and UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, Bill Clinton, on his visit to the tsunami-hit town of Nagapattinam, South India, on 27 May said he would take 'personal responsibility' for finding global markets for products, such as notebooks, scented candles and greeting cards, made by tsunami survivors. "We ought to and we can provide a market for them so that more people can earn a livelihood and more children can go to school. I am going to take personal responsibility to do this and I hope I will be successful", Bill said while addressing a press conference. He also recalled that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said, soon after the killer waves struck the South Indian coast, that an opportunity had arisen from the disaster.

Returning after an 80-minute visit to the tsunami-ravaged district, Bill Clinton said he was 'deeply impressed' by the fighting spirit of the victims who were discovering new means of livelihood, and also by the local government's relief efforts in co-ordination with NGOs and UN agencies. He said India has done "a very good job" of self-financing the relief effort, even going to the aid of neighbouring countries. "What impressed me most was the effort to provide more options for livelihood, such as making candles and notebooks from recycled paper and the paintings of children showing the tsunami scenes, made into greeting cards".

An extremely popular figure in India, Bill Clinton was besieged by adoring crowds wherever he went. He's now left to continue his tour of tsunami-hit areas in Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia.

Almost 300,000 people lost their lives in this mega-disaster, and millions lost their homes and livelihoods. As I said in my first post, this is a continuing effort, spread over years. Please click here for details, pictures etc.

Learning about blogs

The true wonder of the internet, especially in terms of its free aspects, like blogs, is just how much education you can get for free, and that there's always someone willing to pitch in and help you out for no consideration at all. My lack of absolute clarity about what 'blogs' are about, led me into a confrontation with blogexplosion.com, a free service that promotes traffic exchange between blogs. They declined to accept my blog in their exchange for the reason that it was not 'active', ie., no post since the original post in Jan 2005. I saw red on this one, since their WERE what, in my opinion, constituted 'posts'to my blog, in the form of comments from myself as well as outside visitors. I got really mad about what I saw essentially as a cold and technical approach to a real, human issue.. the subject of my blog,, the Asian Tsunami disaster, which is probably the worst NATURAL disaster (there have been worse human-made disasters) the world has seen in a long long while. But they (represented by Rachel) over at blogexplosion persisted in their stand, and ultimately I saw that I had made a mistake in not understanding what blogs really are.. that there is a big technical difference between a 'post' and a 'comment'.. which is what Rachel.. and I AM grateful to her for her patience.. helped me to figure out. Which brings me back to the original line in this POST: the internet is a great place to get a free education. But I still maintain: when one is discussing or highlighting something of enormous human importance, should we be sticking to impersonal technical definitions? Is the law that we seem to serially lay down, one way or another, eg., Microsoft Windows flashing its infamous 'This program has performed an ILLEGAL operation and will be shut down'.. or what the difference is between 'post' and 'comment' on a blog.. more important than our essential humanity?
At this point I must say that I'm not an American.. I'm Asian, though if you met me face to face you wouldn't know the difference..the myth is that Americans are a cold and commercial sort of people.. but I find they are as emotional and volatile as us Eurasians.. as was demo'd when I made my complaint to blogexplosion, and received a passionate and emotional response, a HUMAN response (thank you Rachel), which usually one does not get from our own so-called more 'emotional' and 'humane' societies..now, if only all that emotion could help everyone see beyond themselves...
Hatch

Asian Tsunami Relief

It was about 6 am when my wife woke me up and said 'why are you shaking the bed'? I woke up with a start. The bed was quivering. I knew immediately it was an earthquake. I rushed to my son's room. He was fast asleep. but I saw him shaking from side to side. Woke him up. Said I think we should go downstairs. In the drawing room, a chest of drawers was rocking very gently, very ryhthmically, against the wall. After about 5 minutes all was still. Later that morning my wife and I went shopping. It was only when we returned home around noon that my son said, hey, there's been some sort of tidal wave or something, about 100 people are dead in Chennai. That's where we live, Chennai, formerly known as Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu, a premier South Indian state. Chennai is about 3000 km from where the megaquake happened in Sumatra, Indonesia. But we felt not only the quake, but our beautiful Marina Beach, reputed to be the second longest in the world, was devastated by the tsunami that followed. A close friend of ours, who was out fishing at Muttukkadu, 20 km from Chennai, was hit by the wave.. a strong swimmer, he was taken and smashed on to the highway about a km from the shoreline, bleeding from head to toe, without a shred of clothing left... Another friend, who lives by the sea in one of Chennai's beautiful seaside suburbs, barely escaped the sea's fury.. she climbed on to the roof of her house and witnessed a tsunami in full flow.. 'the sea', she said later, 'was boiling'.

One CNN reporter who visited Ground Zero..Aceh, Indonesia.. said that he'd covered earthquake disasters in India and elsewhere earlier, so he thought he was prepared for the damage he expected to see after the Tsunami.. but he was almost at a loss for words. The devastation is so overwhelming, he said, that the only possible parallel he could think of was probably Hiroshima. That's how bad this is. It's not just immediate relief.. it's going to take months to recover bodies alone, and many years to rebuild the shattered coastlines and communities of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Our contributions therefore can't be just a one-time thing. As Kofi Annan said, this is an unprecedented calamity which calls for an unprecedented response. All suggestions are welcome. I've set up links to some of the important organizations accepting relief- click here