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