Relief operations update

The previous tsunami warning issued by the government turned to be in very bad light. There was no scientific data to back this warning, and it was extremely depressing to see Kapil Sibal on NDTV (the program X-Factor) trying to justify the wrong that was done. The warning resulted in thousands of already distressed and displaced people fleeing their homes (or what was left of them) only to find out nothing really happened later in the day. Kapil Sibal was actually saying that one can never know about a tsunami until it hits the land mass, and we cannot know about a tsunami being generated even when the waves start traveling after an earthquake. How pathetic.

Onto relief operations & updates

• AID: Contact Information for AID collection agencies:

BANGALORE: Prasanna Saligram (080)3229747, (080)3305156

NEW DELHI: Anuj Grover (98182 48459)
MUMBAI: Arun Kumar (98206 05751), Malini Vittal (98193 52190)

CHENNAI: Ravishankar (044) 28350403

Watch http://survivors.aidindia.org for frequent updates from volunteers from

different sites.

• ASHA: A new blog http://ashatsunamirelief.blogspot.com/ has been setup with frequent updates from volunteers from the sites. A bunch of volunteers are leaving from Bangalore tomorrow (Friday, 31st dec) to Nagapatinam.
• I have been trying to coordinate some of the activities for transportation of relief material from different cities. I have already spoken to a few airlines, and they are, for the most part, very responsive. So, if anyone (or any NGO) needs to ship their relief material in bulk, please get in touch with the airline authorities, or send me a mail/leave a comment.
• A lot of other personal & corporate efforts at collecting monetary & non-monetary donations. In Bangalore, Red Cross has set up transportation trucks every two days to carry relief material. FabMall has set up collection points all over town. See here. DHL has also offered to pack & ship material collected from different points in the city (if anyone knows this information correctly, please let me know).

News Flash: Another Tsunami Warning

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4133993.stm

Officials in India's Tamil Nadu state, which was particularly hard hit by the Indian Ocean sea surge, have issued a new tsunami alert. The state government said aftershocks in the Andaman and Nicobar islands may cause high waves and warned people to leave coastal areas, Reuters reported. Eyewitnesses said residents were fleeing in panic. Thousands of Indians have died in the tsunami that followed Sunday's undersea earthquake off Indonesia.
More soon.

Relief work updates

1. If anyone is interested to do rescue work for affected people in Besant Nagar please contact Shihan Hussaini 98411618386. You could help with old clothes, water bottles, blankets, food packets. Even if u cant help please pass on this message to the people whom u know. If anyone is interested to do rescue work for affected people in Neelankarai please contact Priya 25506284.
2. To know details of your loved ones in Nagapattinam and for People willing to do rescue work there please contact the following numbers.
   04635 242 999
   04635 248 777
3. Quite a lot of volunteers from Asha are also working fulltime in the relief efforts: Lakshmi Suryanarayana (surlak@vsnl.net) in Urur Kuppam, Olcott Kuppam is one of them who has been sending daily reports to the Asha mailing lists.
4. http://survivors.aidindia.org - AID India Relief and Rehabilitation Fund: AID has been working a LOT from the accounts I have received. I have gotten in touch with the AID Bangalore & Chennai folks today, will be providing updates on this soon. My friend Vinod at UT Austin has helped raise quite a lot of money in the last few days at this site.
5. More NGOs (from BBC and others)
   Care International
   International Federation of the Red Cross
   Medecins Sans Frontieres
   Oxfam
   Save The Children
   Unicef
   World Vision, Cafod
6. If anyone has any information about volunteer visits to affected areas to assess the damage, plan for future relief projects, please drop me a line, I would be very interested to know and get involved.

Tsunami Relief Support Operations in Bangalore

A few things:

1. See below for one of the relief organizations working in Bangalore
2. I am also trying to coordinate shipment (airlifting) of relief supplies such as food, medicines for some NGOs. Please send me a mail if you would like to help out.
3. We would like to hear about NGOs/relief organizations in some of the remote areas like Nellore, Vishakapatnam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands.

From IndiaTogether

In response to the tsunamis that swept through the eastern coast of India, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere in South East Asia, and the devastation caused by them, Environment Support Group (ESG), Community Health Cell, India Together, Association for India's Development (Bangalore Chapter) and Servelots are putting together a handy list of ways in which concerned citizens and organisations can contribute in cash and kind.

In addition to suggestions for contributions, ESG is also collecting contact information for government and non-government institutions who are directly involved in relief operations. All this information will be present and continually updated online at Tsunami Relief information: http://www.indiatogether.org/relief/tsunami. Please send any critical information you would like to be listed on this website to editors@indiatogether.org to help keep this page current and readily supportive of emergency and relief operations.

We encourage citizens to liberally contribute to the relief of the affected communities. A list of items immediately required is enclosed. Material can be dropped off at the ESG office (address given below) or at

Servelots, 3354, "Pankaja", KR Road, Bangalore, 560070 tsunami@servelots.com -

+91-80-2676-2963.

Please call before you come to the office to drop off your contributions. More drop off points will be identified in coming days.

In addition to contributions in kind, ESG will also accept monetary contributions by cheque/DD in favour of 'Environment Support Group' payable at Bangalore. Please clearly mark the back of the cheque with words "Tsunami Relief Fund". Receipts will be issued. We encourage citizens to come forward to join this effort and to assist people in devastated areas in their time of need.
It is extremely critical that we coordinate efforts of organisations and networks from the Bangalore region in collecting relief material and reaching the same to affected areas. In this regard, it would be helpful if we could meet tomorrow (Tuesday 28 December 2004) at St. Joseph's College of Arts and Science, Langford Road, Bangalore at 4.30 pm. Please encourage others to come.

To enable a point source dissemination effort of critical information, a daily newsletter will be sent out with updated information.

LIST OF MATERIAL TO CONTRIBUTE:

• Food - dry and ready food is preferable as it takes a long time by road to reach the affected areas and food should not spoil. Biscuits, dal, rice, and grains are also needed. Grains should be ground into flour. Tea, sugar, salt, oil etc, will also be in demand. PLEASE PACK ALL FOOD WITH NEAT LABELS IN ENGLISH (Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam if additionally possible).
• Clothes - all types. Especially warm clothes, blankets, durries, chaddar, etc. PLEASE GIVE CLOTHES IN AGE GROUP PACKS OF 0-1; 1-3; 3-7; 7-10; 10-15; 15-18; 18+. KINDLY LABEL THE AGE GROUPS AND WHETHER IT IS FOR GIRLS, BOYS, MEN Or WOMEN. ENSURE ALL BUTTONS ARE SEWED, NO TEARS, AND THAT CLOTHES ARE CLEAN. Sarees and full blouses and lungis are particularly required.
• Lamps - Functional torches with cells for the same, kandil (kerosene lamps), and candles and matches packs.
• Medicines - we are trying to get a list of the medicines that are most needed, but any good doctor can help such a list to be put together. Meanwhile, friends have suggested that the following medicines will be required.

Pain Relief - Ibuprofane, Asprin, Dclofenac, Paracetamol
Infection Prevention/Antibiotics - Amoxicillin
Injuries Dressing - Cotton, Bandages etc.
Dysentry - Diaorehha - Oral Rehydration kits (ORS), Furazolidone, Metronidizole
Anti-Bacterial - Cotrimoxazole
Chloroquine
Carbouys / buckets for fetching water from distance.

This is a quick list, which will be further updated soon.
Thank you.
Leo F. Saldanha/Environment Support Group T. B. Dinesh/Servelots Ashwin Mahesh/India Together Prasanna/Community Health Cell/Association for India's Development (Bangalore Chapter) Subramanya Sastry

Contact Address:
Environment Support Group R S-3, Rajashree Apartments, 18/57, 1st Main Road, S. R. K. Gardens, Jayanagar, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore 560041. INDIA Telefax: 91-80-26534364/26531339/26341977 Fax: 91-80-51179912 Email: esg@esgindia.org or esg@bgl.vsnl.net.in Web: www.esgindia.org

Please call before you come to the office to drop off your contributions. More drop off points will be identified in coming days. In addition to contributions in kind, ESG will also accept monetary contributions by cheque/DD in favour of 'Environment Support Group' payable at Bangalore. Please clearly mark the back of the cheque with words"Tsunami Relief Fund". Receipts will be issued.We encourage citizens to come forward to join this effort and to assist people in devastated areas in their time of need.It is extremely critical that we coordinate efforts of organisations and networks from the Bangalore region in collecting relief material and reaching the same to affected areas. In this regard, it would be helpful if we could meet tomorrow (Tuesday 28 December 2004) at St. Joseph'sCollege of Arts and Science, Langford Road, Bangalore at 4.30 pm. Please encourage others to come.To enable a point source dissemination effort of critical information,a daily newsletter will be sent out with updated information.

LIST OF MATERIAL TO CONTRIBUTE:

• FOOD:. Food - dry and ready food is preferable as it takes a long time byroadto reach the affected areas and food should not spoil. Biscuits, dal,rice,and grains are also needed. Grains should be ground into flour. Tea,sugar,salt, oil etc, will also be in demand. PLEASE PACK ALL FOOD WITH NEATLABELS IN ENGLISH (Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam if additionallypossible)..
• Clothes - all types. Especially warm clothes, blankets, durries,chaddar,etc. PLEASE GIVE CLOTHES IN AGE GROUP PACKS OF 0-1; 1-3; 3-7; 7-10;10-15;15-18; 18+. KINDLY LABEL THE AGE GROUPS AND WHETHER IT IS FOR GIRLS,BOYS,MEN Or WOMEN. ENSURE ALL BUTTONS ARE SEWED, NO TEARS, AND THAT CLOTHES ARE CLEAN. Sarees and full blouses and lungis are particularly required..
• Lamps - Functional torches with cells for the same, kandil (kerosenelamps), and candles and matches packs..
• Medicines - we are trying to get a list of the medicines that aremostneeded, but any good doctor can help such a list to be put together.Meanwhile, friends have suggested that the following medicines will berequired.* Pain Relief - Ibuprofane, Asprin, Dclofenac, Paracetamol* Infection Prevention/Antibiotics - Amoxicillin* Injuries Dressing - Cotton, Bandages etc.* Dysentry - Diaorehha - Oral Rehydration kits (ORS), Furazolidone,Metronidizole* Anti-Bacterial - Cotrimoxazole* Chloroquine. Carbouys / buckets for fetching water from distance.

This is a quick list, which will be further updated soon.

In solidarity,Leo F. Saldanha/Environment Support Group; Dinesh/Servelots;

AshwinMahesh/India Together; Prasanna/Community Health Cell

Association forIndia's Development (Bangalore Chapter); Subramanya Sastry

Contact Address:Environment Support Group RS-3, Rajashree Apartments, 18/57, 1st Main Road, S. R. K. Gardens,Jayanagar, Bannerghatta Road,Bangalore 560041. INDIATelefax: 91-80-26534364/26531339/26341977Fax: 91-80-51179912Email: esg@e... or esg@b...Web: http://www.esgindia.org

Tsunami Disaster Relief

Here are more links to agencies we can offer suppport/help to. There is a Tsunami blog also here. Thanks to Vinod, The Acorn & others.

AID
https://www.aidindia.org/aidadmin/DonateToRRF.jsp

The Hindu Relief Fund
http://pay.hindu.com/thrfpay/thrfpay.jsp

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Sri Lanka Tsunami: OCHA Situation Report No. 1
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/480fa8736b88bbc3c12564f6004c8ad5/f8bd0416c9d6bb36c1256f76004072b1?OpenDocument

TN Govt. Website
Chief Minister's Public Relief Fund
http://www.tn.gov.in/misc/cmprf2003.htm

Rediff USA
How you can help tsunami victims
http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/dec/27tsunami8.htm


India: Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, by bank transfer, or by credit card;

Niranjani provides contact numbers of relief workers in Chennai (Madras). (They need essential items like non-perishable food, clothing and essential drugs like antibiotics, paracetamol and pain-killers).

Sri Lanka: Reliefweb (United Nations office)

Maldives: Relief center telephone contacts Saabe +(960) 776805, Eva +(960) 782747, Faya +(960) 776142 or Ziyad +(960) 772598 (via Divehi Observer); they need food, clothes and basic necessities

Malaysia: Bloggers have set up a fund for those affected in the Malaysian state of Penang

International NGOs: The New York Times big list of agencies you can support (via Saheli); Online donations accepted by the US Red Cross, Singapore Red Cross, Oxfam and Care (Australia).

Nature's Fury

The largest earthquake in the last 40 years of recorded history (8.9 on the Richter) has, within a day of its striking, taken over 11,000 lives according to some news reports. For the first times, tsunamis have struck India's coastal regions of Tamil Nadu. According to a NDTV news item this morning, US Geological Survey teams tried warning countries in SE Asia on the impending tsunamis & flash floods, but most of the countries in the SE Asian subcontinent are not equipped with tsunami warning centers. Anyway, it was perhaps too late. In India alone, the tsunami has now claimed over 4000 lives.

From The Acorn, a few links as to what we can do to contribute to the relief operations:

India: Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, by bank transfer, or by credit card
Sri Lanka: Reliefweb (United Nations office)
Red Cross: Accepts donations online
Others:Vichaar’s list of relief agencies; On The Command Post; At A Voyage to Arcturus (via Tim Blair).

And if you know of any other ways to help government/NGOs carrying out relief work, please send me a note/leave a comment.

Back from HiPC 2004

The last couple of weeks were extremely hectic taking care of all the arrangements to be done for HiPC 2004. This year, we had some excellent keynote talks, including:

• Arvind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Rethinking Computer Architecture Research": Arvind had some very interesting points to make about the direction of computer architecture research academia has been doing for the last couple of decades. The main point was that simple simulation results and claims for incremental increase in efficiency, power, performance, etc. are completely irrelevant as far as the industry goes. The need for a more collaborative approach to computer architecture research has never been greater, and he described some of the recent work his team has been doing in this regard at MIT (Bluespec).
• Norm Jouppi, Hewlett Packard ”The Future Evolution of High Performance Microprocessors". This talk sort of defined the next decade of the evolution of microprocessors given the trend of semiconductor technology and Moore's Law. Essentially his point was that there is no single silver bullet to avoid the Power Wall and limitations of existing Si-Ge process technology.
• Christos Papadimitriou, University of California, Berkeley on "Networks and Games". Christos is a quite an entertaining personality even in keynote talks. His talk spanned game theory concepts like Nash equilibria, cooperative & non-cooperative gaming theory, application to the Internet and networking paradigms, etc. He mentioned & acknowledged his recent collaborators that included big names like Tim Roughgarden (Stanford), Eva Tardos (Cornell), and it was pleasantly surprising to hear him mention a friend of mine Rahul Sami (used to know him at Yale, now he is a post doc at MIT).

I had to take care of some arrangements for the keynote speakers, and it was wonderful to see how nice these people are - unassuming, extremely polite & just plain nice to talk to. I could not help contrast that to the arrogant & rude people I come across who think no end of themselves, and for no reason what-so-ever.

It was nice meeting up with a whole bunch of folks - Dr. Prathima Agrawal, Dr. Vishwani Agrawal, Dr. Sartaj Sahni, and also my advisor from my Rutgers days, Dr. Manish Parashar. It was a nice experience being in the Steering Committee meetings for such conferences. HiPC 2005 is in Goa, FYI.

This time, we also had a larger participation this year, including a lot of students from Indian colleges & universities. Not to mention the great set of volunteers we had - we also managed to get a few more interested in helping out for next year! Animesh will hopefully have some pics soon online.

A vision for the future of science

Thomas Friedman has a recent column on the recent budget cut bill passed by the US Congress that cuts funding for NSF by 2%.

Of all the irresponsible aspects of the 2005 budget bill that the Republican-led Congress just passed, nothing could be more irresponsible than the fact that funding for the National Science Foundation was cut by nearly 2 percent, or $105 million.

Think about this. We are facing a mounting crisis in science and engineering education. The generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians who were spurred to get advanced degrees by the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik and the challenge by President John Kennedy to put a man on the moon is slowly retiring.

But because of the steady erosion of science, math and engineering education in U.S. high schools, our cold war generation of American scientists is not being fully replenished. We traditionally filled the gap with Indian, Chinese and other immigrant brainpower. But post-9/11, many of these foreign engineers are not coming here anymore, and, because the world is now flat and wired, many others can stay home and innovate without having to emigrate.

If President Bush is looking for a legacy, I have just the one for him - a national science project that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, he would dry up revenue for terrorism; force Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to take the path of reform - which they will never do with $45-a-barrel oil - strengthen the dollar; and improve his own standing in Europe, by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a magnet to inspire young people to contribute to the war on terrorism and America's future by becoming scientists, engineers and mathematicians. "This is not just a win-win," said the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum. "This is a win-win-win-win-win."

Or, Mr. Bush can ignore this challenge and spend the next four years in an utterly futile effort to persuade Russia to be restrained, Saudi Arabia to be moderate, Iran to be cautious and Europe to be nice.

Well, that is about the US. I was curious to find out about Indian governmental expenditure on science and innovation. I found this interesting article from the United Nations University Press. It is called "Technological Independence - The Asian Experience". It is a very detailed article, and I have not read it completely yet and I write this while I wait for this huge piece of code to compile. But here are some interesting pieces:

A study by Konrad and Wahl (who?) classified countries into eight stages of S&T (Science & Technology) development on the basis of seven quantitative indicators of S&T potential, such as S&T personnel, R&D expenditure, proportion of productive R&D, etc., and five qualitative indicators of development of S&T infrastructure. According to these criteria, India is classified in the sixth stage (of the eight successive stages), along with other newly industrializing countries (NICs) such as Brazil, the Republic of Korea, Indonesia, and Argentina. The higher stages, i.e. seventh or eighth, include all developed countries, with the USA, Germany, Japan, and France in the eighth, and Italy, the Netherlands, and Canada in the seventh.

Another study analysing the technology exports of developing countries has rated India as "most diverse and 'deep' (in terms of going into basic design of products and capabilities among the NICs ... India is able to provide not just the operating knowledge to set up and run industries (the know-how), but also the design and manufacture of the plant and equipment, designed specifically for the client (the know-why)." India's achievement is considered to be more notable because of the fact that "India seems to have the lowest relative reliance on foreign technology of all the NICs in the past fifteen years or so."

Well, that sounds nice, but are the problems:

In spite of the growing amounts spent, the national laboratories have failed to become important sources of industrial technology.42 Furthermore, a large proportion of the technologies developed by them are not utilized for commercial purposes. The impulse to innovate originates either in the production process (process simplifications/improvements, material/labour-saving devices, overall efficiency, etc.) or in the market (product improvement, changing demand/tastes/patterns, scope of import substitution, etc.). The national laboratories receive no feedback from either of these sources. They operate in an environment isolated from production units, do not sell innovations directly to the industry, draw their resources almost entirely from the government, and have mostly officials and scientists on their boards. They are not involved in the import of technology. Therefore the possibility of their contributing to the local absorption of imported technology does not arise.

Quite disturbing to me. I am sure privatization of some of these behemoth organizations would go a long way in opening up the organizations, making them more accountable, profitable & attractive to the youth. I was talking to my cousin, a very senior manager in BEL (Bharat Electronics Limited), one of the largest Public Sector Units about opportunities for the younger generation, and what attractions are there for a person like me. Sadly, there was not much - too much bureaucracy, hierarchy, politics in most such organizations. Unless people like our president, APJ Abdul Kalam, an ambassador and promoter of science & technology, makes a foray in this direction, I can see it will be really hard for India to promote, encourage & sustain interest of the youth in S&T.

More perhaps over the weekend on this.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things

Art/Music/Theatre in Bangalore

I intended to post something quite a while back, actually there have been a whole lot of things happening around here, but it has been very hectic at work of late. Also coming up is HiPC 2004, for which I have been running around taking of a lot of local arrangements. If anyone is in town for the conference, drop me a line. I caught up yesterday on a lot of things on Unhappy Anniversaries (posted by Amardeep), a lot of outsourcing debates and discussions by Amardeep & Daniel Drezner, and India current affairs by Nitin. BTW, Nitin Pai's The Acorn was recently rated the best India Current Affairs blog. Way to go, Nitin!

Anyways, I went for this play a couple of weeks ago called Tumhari Amrita. It was quite a unique one, I had not seen anything like this before. The play was very simple, just 2 roles, played by Shabana Azmi and Farooq Shaikh, two brilliant actors. They just sat on stage and read letters written to each other over a period of 35 years. It was brilliant, they were both emoting so well, it was amazing. Shabana, I thought, actually had tears in her eyes towards the end.

A whole bunch of other events happening in Bangalore of late. Just concluded was a month long theatre festival at Ranga Shankara. This is a very new facility built solely for art & drama, in the memory of one of the most talented Kannada theatre (and also film) personalities - Shankar Nag. Shankar passed away in a tragic accident in 1993, and his wife, another brilliant actress and theatre personality, Arundati Nag, has continued the saga. She has contributed immensely to the popularity, encouragement and promotion of art, theatre, music & dance in Bangalore with multiple projects - Nrityagram is another such endeavour of hers, although now, there are a lot of supporters for this magnificient school of dance first started by Pratima Bedi. Nrityagram is also the host of Vasantha Habba (Vasantha means Spring, and Habba is festival, so the Spring Festival), termed the Woodstock of India. It is an all night music & dance extravaganza held the first Sat of every February. I attended this last year, and was absolutely blown away by the experience.

Currently happening is Bangalore Habba, a potpourri of music, dance, art, film from Dec 5 to 12. Some of the well known artists this year are - Pt. Shivkumar Sharma, Priyadarshini Govind (Bharatanatyam - she is absolutely brilliant, I saw her last year at Vasantha Habba), Pratibha Prahlad (Bharatanatyam again), Mallika Sarabhai, the Nrityagram Odissi dance ensemble (this group was superb too), Pt. Rajan & Sajan Mishra (Hindustani classical vocal), and a lot more. All the performances are FREE! The only sad thing is that a lot of these happen during the week, and one has to get the tickets a day in advance at the venue only, I believe. I hope I can catch some of these at least.

Coming up soon, Jan & Feb is the Zakir Hussain tour of India, I hope I can see him again. More when I have details.

Links on Bangalore Habba: Here, here.