| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
NOVEMBER 2005 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
EDITORIAL:
Global Sympathy for Quake-hit Pakistan Sometimes a natural disaster is so harrowing in its intensity, so heartbreaking in the toll it takes in human lives and suffering, that we forget for a moment all our geopolitical prejudices and realize the essential humanity that binds us all in one big global human family. The devastating earthquake that struck Pakistan and parts of Indian Kashmir is such a disaster. The 7.6 earthquake hit Pakistan Oct. 8, but the death toll continues to climb. The death toll is 80,000 at press time and will surely climb by the time the magazine hits the newsstands. U.N. officials say 3.3 million people are homeless. As the entire world has reached out its hand in sympathy, it has to be said that the support that has been forthcoming falls far short of the enormous need. Yet this is also a time when not only Pakistanis have rallied within and outside the country to the support of their beleaguered countrymen, but archrival India is also making warm, compassionate gestures. In addition to rushing relief in the immediate aftermath, it has offered $25 million in aid and is considering opening three aid centers on the Line of Control to allow Pakistani quake victims to seek medical care or meet their relatives on the other side of the border. Of the toll, the suffering, the relief operations, the continued need, there has been blanket coverage in the media. We at Siliconeer thought we would ask a Pakistani Silicon Valley resident to talk about what it all looks like from his vantage point. We are very grateful to Sabahat Ashraf for sharing his reflections on not just the earthquake, but what new realizations has dawned on him about his country, his people, and the rest of the world in the aftermath of the worst natural disaster his country has ever faced. Sandeep Pandey will not be an unfamiliar name to our regular readers. Previous issues of our magazine have carried articles by this Magsaysay award-winning engineer-turned-activist who founded the nonprofit Asha which supports numerous basic education projects in India. Pandey was recently here to be honored by Indians for Collective Action, the Bay Area nonprofit group that nurtured and mentored Asha when he founded it with three fellow graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. Sandeep’s commitment to the cause of the marginalized has resulted in his giving up a cushy job at IIT Kanpur and moving to an ashram in a village in Uttar Pradesh. He continues to work and assist the people around the ashram as well as he can; he writes about a recent campaign he organized during the Panchayat elections to demand accountability of disbursement of government funds. COVER STORY: After the Quake: The Web and Expatriate Support - By Sabahat Ashraf As his own efforts to mobilize communication, assistance and free flow of information on the Web gathered momentum following the devastating earthquake that hit Pakistan and also India, amid the heartrending tragedy of incalculable loss and suffering are also heartening stories of an outpouring of support, writes Sabahat Ashraf.  A photo of Magala Towers in Islamabad taken soon after the earthquake Oct. 8. The building collapsed and about 80 flats were demolished as a result. Since it was the morning, most of the people were in their flats, and at the time the photo was taken, were under the debris. Police and Army teams were trying to rescue them. (M. Bukhari photo) According to the netizen’s reference of choice, the Wikipedia, the recent earthquake hit South Asia 08:50:38 Pakistan Standard Time (03:50:38 UTC/ 09:20:38 India Standard Time) on Saturday, October 8th, 2005. It was Friday night here in California and, as a lot of us are wont to do, before I turned in to sleep, I happened to glance at Yahoo! News headlines. There was mention about a quake in Pakistan. It seemed like a pretty serious natural disaster—though, at the time, we had no idea quite how serious. For about six months, I have been working on a project called WikiPakistan (pakistan.wikicities.com), a “Pakistan Information Database” hosted on WikiCities, a system run by the same foundation that runs the WikiPedia. (The WikiPedia is a free and “Open Source” encyclopedia based on the new “Wiki” technology for developing Web sites.) Up to that point, this project had been moving rather slowly, with me trying to get people interested and entering information in between holding down a Silicon Valley day job, managing two kids both of whose parents have professional jobs, and trying to keep my blog up to date. But as I read the news about the quake, I realized that this was exactly the kind of situation that this project could address. I created a page on the site devoted to the quake. Then I sent an e-mail to several mailing lists I am on and to friends informing them and inviting them to contribute, and went to sleep. By then, it had a couple of news links, a couple of links to technical information about the quake, and some empty sections for links to personal accounts, organizations working to provide relief, governments’ response, and some other useful links. It was 2:08 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, and about 2:00 p.m. in Pakistan when I made my last edit that night. It had been a little over five hours since the earthquake hit. By the next morning, of course, the world was buzzing with news, views, interviews and information about the quake, relief efforts, statistics, and the like. Over the next few days, I fell into the routine of following what I could from mailing lists, e-mails being sent around, news sites, and the like and adding information to the wiki site. Very soon, others joined in—not least, people on the ground in Pakistan. Of course, while I was hunched over my computer trying to engage with the situation like the geek I am, in the outside world, the response can best be described with hackneyed phrases like “massive outpouring of compassion” and “international mobilization” and so on. Those phrases seem trite or clichéd, but they are the only ones that come close to doing justice. I had followed some earlier trends, like the mobilization in the South Asian and Muslim communities around Hurricane Katrina, but what happened around the earthquake was, if anything, in an order of magnitude that was much larger in scope and size. And having already organized around that issue just a short time before, there were structures to build on. Muslim groups around the U.S. had coalesced into the Muslim Hurricane Relief Task Force. This very soon transformed itself into the Muslim Task Force for Disaster Preparedness and Relief. In the lead was the Silicon Valley-based organization called Hidaya (www.hidaya.org). Hidaya is a non-profit organization headed by Waseem Baloch with its roots mainly amongst Muslim South Asians in Silicon Valley trying to live up to their religious and cultural traditions of sadaqah, or charity. They started out coordinating monetary and material help for needy groups in Pakistan and have, over the last few years, expanded operations to where they now “implement educational, social welfare, and charitable projects in economically depressed areas of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, West Africa and North America.” They have, to a large extent, become the Silicon Valley Muslim South Asian’s alternative to the Salvation Army. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as I mentioned above, they had taken the lead in bringing various Muslim charities around the nation together to coordinate relief in the community. And now an even larger effort was needed where the heart and soul of its core constituency felt a strongest bonds.
And just as the governments of South Asia have been seen working together in the last week or two like they have never done before, the communities and groups working on earthquake relief didn’t just break down boundaries and differences of ethnicity, faith, national boundaries and even corporate competition, they just ignored them. Groups like the Association for India’s Development, which had had a lot of experience in large-scale disaster relief around the tsunami that hit South East Asia just some months previously, reached out to help, advise, and expertise in coordinating relief, raising funds, and any other way they could. And in the world of Silicon Valley, people, whose usual interaction — though always professional and cordial — is usually one of fierce competition, were exchanging notes and e-mails on how to help in the effort. One other aspect not often mentioned, especially in the diaspora, (though even the New York Times seems to have noticed in the last day or two) is that, in a country so often riven by ethnic and sectarian tensions as Pakistan, one where the reaction of the common man to engagement with national issues is often one of extreme cynicism, it was obvious very early in the aftermath of the quake that something very different from the norm was taking hold, at least temporarily. The e-mail loops, and the blogosphere in Pakistan, itself rapidly coming of age in a time of national crisis, was abuzz with information about volunteer efforts, and fundraising, as we say in Pakistan, from Karachi to Khyber. The former cosmopolis, so often exclusively the source of news about ethnic strife, curfews, and violence, had suddenly gotten into high gear as a source of volunteers, monetary contributions, and help for their fellow compatriots. The Metro Blogs for Karachi and Lahore became the best place to go for information on what was going on where. (And in one case, the place to turn to as this correspondent debated whether to wake his mother up at 2 a.m. in the morning and warn her about a 4.0 tremor that had just hit Karachi.) And of course, for those that don’t know, in a time of crisis, there is one place every Pakistani turns to. To a man, woman and child around the globe, the first name on Pakistanis’ lips was “Edhi.” It is name of the founder of an organization most non-Pakistanis — or even second generation members of the diaspora — had never heard about before Oct. 8. It is Pakistan’s FEMA, Salvation Army, Red Cross, and Mother Teresa rolled into one. (Though to be fair, Pakistan does have a proper Red Cross organization — we call it the Hilal-e-Ahmar, or Red Crescent, Society.) The Edhi Foundation — or just Edhi, after its founder and moving spirit, Abdus Sattar Edhi has Edhi Welfare Centers that span the country with services that include emergency centers, free dispensaries, hospitals, maternity homes, child homes and girls hostels. The foundation runs what is now listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest volunteer ambulance organization. Over the last few decades, they have reached out to help in international disaster situations — sending a hundred thousand dollars to help in the first few days after Hurricane Katrina, for example. And yet, the low-key, no-nonsense style of the foundation has meant that although there are now offices and registered charities in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Japan, Australia and Bangladesh, they do not have the slick, you-can-donate-online kind of Web site most of use have come to not only expect, but, as it turned out in the last couple of weeks, demand from a non-profit. But the faith and deep support amongst Pakistanis for Edhi even surmounted that in the aftermath of the quake. Very soon, the Association for the Development of Pakistan (www.developpakistan.org), an organization headquartered in Boston, provided a way on their own Web site to make a tax-deductible donation to the Edhi Foundation through them (providing the option to donate to the official relief fund as well.) In the last couple of weeks, we saw a Muslim nation come together in a time of need; a nation that others have dismissed as a “failed state” and one of the “Least Developed Countries.” This disaster brought Pakistan and Pakistanis together like never before. (One poster on Metro Blog Lahore pointed out Pakistan’s winning of the 1992 World Cup of cricket as the only other time he felt a similar spirit). It brought friend and stranger alike together to work in a spirit of humanitarianism.
Just one founded and run by an simple, God-fearing, unassuming, plain-spoken man in rubber slippers and basic kurta-pyjama (the dress that is the origin of our modern sleepwear, our pyjamas) who often drives the ambulances himself and makes no religious pretensions. In fact, he is someone who has butted heads over the last five decades with almost every religious and ethnic organization in Pakistan, over the years providing some unconventional welfare services despite severe social and cultural opposition, most memorably placing cradles at Edhi Welfare Centers for abandoned babies — a no-questions-asked policy often controversial even in the most “liberal” of Western democracies. For as this simple man says in his simple language, “My religion is humanitarianism….. Which is basis [sic] of every religion in this world.”
SOCIAL WORK: Cleaning Up Polls: Asha's Grassroots Campaign in U.P. - By Sandeep Pandey Asha Ashram in Uttar Pradesh led a campaign during the recent Panchayat elections in Hardoi and Varanasi districts for accountable government at the grassroots level, taking on corrupt elected officials, writes Sandeep Pandey.  Two women sit at a meeting of elected representatives of panchayati raj and urban local bodies from across the country in New Delhi. At recent panchayat elections in U.P., volunteers of Asha campaigned for candidates who pledged transparency and accountability. (PIB photo) The panchayat elections have just gotten over in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Because of Asha Parivar’s role in the Right to Information campaign first in Hardoi district and then in Varanasi district, where information related to income and expenditure of funds coming to village panchayats under various heads and schemes were demanded by the people of these villages, it was quite natural that when it came time to re-elect the pradhans (heads of elected village committees which are responsible for undertaking development works as well as for selecting beneficiaries for various schemes of the government), volunteers of Asha Parivar would be playing an important role. In addition to people who were part of the Right to Information campaign who wanted to contest the elections there were others, who did not participate in the campaign but were interested in Asha Ashram endorsing their candidature as it would improve their standing in the eyes of the electorate. The aspirants were asked to commit themselves to transparency and accountability, honesty and not using any illegitimate means during their campaign.
For the first time Asha Ashram volunteers campaigned in their work area and asked people to vote for candidates supported by the Ashram. There were candidates — corrupt, feudal, criminal — whom the Ashram was opposing and they did not like it. They did everything to foil Ashram’s campaign for cleaner politics. Voter rolls were tampered with, the code of conduct for campaigning was violated. Whenever people brought any of these discrepancies to the notice of Asha volunteers, the district Web site Lokvani would be used to lodge a complaint and the district magistrate would be informed. The present DM Abhishek Singh took prompt action in most of the cases to rectify the situation.
The results were announced. Most of the candidates directly associated with the ashram lost. However, there were about ten pradhans in Hardoi District and another 4-5 in Varanasi who said they would like to work with the ashram. Mukesh, an active volunteer at Mehdiganj working with Nandlal’s anti-Coca Cola movement, was the new pradhan of Village Panchayat Nagepur. He happens to the youngest pradhan in Varanasi district. A ceremony was organized at Asha Ashram, Lalpur, in late September with about 200 people attending including the DM, where several pradhans and panchayat members from Hardoi, Varanasi, Chitrakoot, Ballia, Deoria and Rae Bareli participated in a workshop for better governance and took an oath of “office and transparency” as opposed to the oath of “office and secrecy” delivered for any public office.
A similar exercise was repeated for more pradhans and members only from Varanasi District at Nandlal’s Ashram in Mehdiganj Sept. 28. This meeting was attended by the Member of Parliament from Varanasi, Rajesh Mishra, belonging to the Congress Party. Mishra on this occasion also committed that he would support the people’s campaign for rights over water resources against the Coca Cola bottling plant. Fortunately, both the village panchayats containing the bottling plants in Mehdiganj, Varanasi and Sinhachawar, Ballia now have pradhans who are supporters of the anti-Coca Cola movement. The pradhan at Ballia, Chinta Devi, attended the ceremony at Hardoi in September and she has already declared her intentions of taking on the company. Asha Parivar may not have returned a number of candidates as pradhans or members but put up a tough battle for opponents. More importantly, there is more to the election than immediate electoral victory. The awareness created by the campaign for the Right to Information had a definite role in fair polling and counting of votes. A cooperative DM obviously was a big help. The campaign of Asha Parivar for empowerment of people continues and Asha volunteers and members of the Parivar will continue their vigorous efforts to ensure transparent and good governance in panchayats, whether the pradhans are sympathetic to the Ashram or not. NEWS DIARY: October Roundup  Afghans Outraged | Second Catastrophe Looms after Pakistan’s Worst Disaster | Floods Maroon Thousands | World’s Most Corrupt | Court Battle Over N.T. Rama Rao Kin | N.Y. Bangladesh Cabbie Fighting for Life | Onions from Pakistan | Fishermen Slam Ban | ‘Hurt’ Infosys Founder Quits Airport Job | War on Media | Assam Tribal Feud | Islamist Group Banned | Subversive War |Gas Giants Fight for India Field Afghans Outraged Islamic clerics expressed outrage at television footage that purportedly shows U.S. soldiers burning the bodies of two dead Taliban fighters to taunt other militants and warned of a possible violent anti-American backlash. The footage, captured by Australian TV channel SBS, showed the corpses of two Taleban fighters laid out facing Mecca and then being set alight.
Later footage showed two U.S. soldiers reading from a notebook messages which they said had already been broadcast to villagers. “Attention Taleban you are cowardly dogs,” the message read. “You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing West and burnt. “You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be.” President Hamid Karzai condemned the alleged desecration and ordered an inquiry. The operational commander of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, which launched its own criminal probe, said the alleged act, if true, was “repugnant.” Worried about the potential for anti-American feelings, the U.S. State Department said it had instructed U.S. embassies around the globe to tell local governments that the reported abuse did not reflect American values. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has urged military commanders to speed up their inquiry into claims that their troops burned Taleban corpses. He said the longer it took to verify the allegations, the more harm it would do to the country’s image abroad. Cremating bodies is banned under Islam, and one Muslim leader in Afghanistan compared the video to photographs of U.S. troops abusing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
U.N. official Jan Egeland said that millions of lives were at risk, referring to the 3.3 million people left homeless by the 7.6-magnitude quake. “Catastrophe looms large,” said U.N. official Rashid Khalikov. “The danger is there that the loss of life would be very high if the required help does not reach them” before winter. Pakistan’s government raised the official death toll to 54,197, with 78,000 injured. Central government figures have consistently lagged behind those by local officials, which put the death toll in Pakistan at about 78,000. A further 1,350 people died in Indian Kashmir. India has offered aid worth $25 million to Pakistan for relief and rebuilding areas ravaged by this month’s deadly earthquake. The Indian offer was made at the U.N.-sponsored meeting in Geneva. “The government of Pakistan would be welcome to use this contribution for rebuilding homes and rehabilitating people, reconstructing the infrastructure and restoring essential services,” Indian spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters. “It may also procure supplies of building material such as cement, steel and other items from India. Indian technology for prefabricated, earthquake-resistant shelters will also be made available to Pakistan,” he said. New Delhi’s announcement came two days before officials of the two countries hold talks in Islamabad to discuss steps to open up Indian relief camps for Pakistani victims along the frontier in disputed Kashmir. India has so far sent more than 100 metric tons of emergency supplies to Pakistan.
“The situation is bad in four southern districts, but we are doing everything necessary,” West Bengal Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta said. Officials said at least 10 people had died in the coastal eastern state due to wall collapses and electrocution in the rains and some 50,000 people were cut off by floods. Relief officials warned the situation could get worse for hundreds of thousands of people living in the Sunderbans region, where two rivers were close to bursting their banks. Rains also hit life in Kolkata, eastern India’s main trading hub, which was flooded for a second day after the city’s century-old drainage system failed to cope with the water. Cars and motorcycles floated in waist-deep water, while people waded their way around the city and residents of some low-lying areas used boats. Many shops and business establishments were closed and road traffic was thin. During the monsoon season, floods and mudslides killed more than 1,000 people in western India. The country’s financial hub, Mumbai, was brought to a standstill for four days when a record 94 cm of rain fell in 24 hours. Bangladesh and Chad have been jointly put on top of the list — both having 1.7 points on a scale of 10, 1 being most corrupt and 10 being the least — out some 159 countries of the world.
Last year, Bangladesh and Nigeria jointly topped the list of corrupt nations. In 2001, Bangladesh was first placed at the top slot among the most corrupt countries by Transparency International, raising widespread controversy and condemnation. Trustee board member of the Transparency International, Bangladesh Prof. Mozaffar Ahmed revealed the report at a press conference at Jatiya Press Club. The report was simultaneously released all over the world. This time TI got information from seven sectors of the country against three sectors last year. “Information will be collected from other sectors too next time,” Prof. Mozaffar Ahmed told reporters. Ahmed said Bangladesh emerged top among 146 countries last year and this time the number of countries is 159. The sources of the CPI this year were The Center for International Earth Science Information Network of Columbia University, Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, Information international, International Institute for Management Development at Lausanne in Switzerland, Merchant International Group, Political and Economical Risk Consultancy, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, World Economic Forum and World Markets Research Center.
Upset with the order of the foreign subordinate court, the Supreme Court has asked solicitor-general G.E. Vahanvati to find out “if diplomatic arrangements can be made so that there is no scope for a superior court’s order in one country to be ignored by a court of another country.”’ Vahanvati has shot off a letter to foreign secretary Shyam Saran to initiate action on the remarks of the bench headed by Justice Arijit Pasayat, which observed that “‘it needs no emphasis that the effect of the court’s order — more particularly a superior court — and its enforceability should not be left to be decided by the perception of a court in another country.” The case involves NTR’s son Nandamuri Jayakrishna and his wife Padmaja seeking custody of their grandchildren — sons of their daughter Kumudini, after she was allegedly driven to death by her NRI husband Srinath Prasad in October 2000. In January 2004, a Chennai court convicted Srinath of abetting the death and sentenced him to 10 years’ imprisonment. He has since appealed the order. The grandparents lost the custody battle in the Supreme Court in 2001, moved a lower court in 2003, alleging that the children were not safe with a person who had driven their mother to death. The lower court ruled that it didn’t have jurisdiction in the matter. Subsequently, the Andhra Pradesh High Court said the lower court did indeed have jurisdiction to adjudicate on the case. Srinath challenged this order in the Supreme Court, which on March 28, 2005, directed him to produce the children in Justice Arijit Pasayat’s chamber on April 25, 2005. Mathew said Rahman was struck without warning while returning to his taxicab from a coffee break early morning Oct 2. The impact of the blow instantly caused a brain hemorrhage. Rahman lapsed into a coma and was fighting for his life. According to a report in The New York Times, Rahman slipped into a coma when a stranger punched him in the head at a gas station in the Upper East Side in Manhattan, New York City, in the early morning of Oct 2. The Times report said the blow caught Rahman by surprise and he fell to the ground, banging his head against the pavement. The assailant was whisked away in a white van. A witness jotted down the van’s license plate number, and called 911. Investigators have tracked down the owner of the van and were “aggressively working” to find the person who punched Rahman. Rahman’s wife told the paper her husband had been driving a cab for a year, working 14-hour days seven days a week. He moved to New York in 1990 from Bangladesh, and received his green card last year. According to NYFTA, “In May, 2000, the U.S. Department of Labor classified taxi driving as the most dangerous job in the country, with taxi drivers being 60 times more likely to be killed on the job than any other worker.” The onions from Pakistan are expected to arrive soon. With the delivery cost working out to Rs. 15 to 17 per kg, by the time they reach the consumer, the cost would be around Rs. 25 per kg. A total of 2,000 metric tons of onions, imported by private parties, are already on their way from Pakistan. Pawar said the shortage was a result of poor yield. “But latest reports say the crop has started arriving in Nasik and Alwar mandis.” “The shortage will continue for the next 10 to 12 days,”’ said Pawar. He added the prices have started to come down. Meanwhile, there are indications that the shortage will last for two weeks at the most. The immediate cause for shortage is last week’s heavy rain in the Nasik belt. Since most fields are water-logged, farmers postponed harvesting. This made things worse as the September crop in Satara and Sangli was damaged. Adding to the unease is the fact that the mandis are closed for a week after Diwali. Seventy percent of the country’s onions comes from the Nasik belt.
Military officials raised the issue of fishermen continuing to refuse the adoption of the “pass” system. Fishermen union representatives said that currently the SLN has imposed a restriction that fishermen who go out to see for night fishing can only return to the shore after 5 a.m. This restriction forces fishermen to stay in mid-sea for more than 10 hours if they go out at 7 p.m, and especially with the prevailing stormy conditions, threat of tsunami and the threat of heavy rains due to the North East monsoon fishermen may be forced to return to shore on emergencies, union officials said. The Navy’s restrictions have placed a tremendous burden on fishermen, they added. Until these urgent needs of the fishermen are addressed and resolved, fishermen are not inclined to abide by the pass numbers and other restrictive procedures, fishermen representatives told security commanders. Murthy said: “I have spent an enormous amount of time and energy interacting with the government in Delhi and in Karnataka to make this work. The records prove themselves.” He said Gowda, who heads Janata Dal (S), a coalition partner in Karnataka’s government, was a constant opponent of IT firms in the state. Last week Gowda asked the state government to set up an inquiry into land allotment for IT companies near the airport. Gowda named Infosys as one of the companies that had been allotted government land at low cost. He has also questioned the jobs IT firms have brought to the state. The consortium, Bangalore International Airport, is overseeing a new airport at Devenhalli. It took seven years to begin construction. At present airlines have to make do with poor facilities at the international wing of the domestic airport. There is just one X-ray machine to screen baggage. Next month three more international airlines, British Airways, Air France and Northwest Airlines will start direct flights from Bangalore.
The raid came on the eve of the FM station’s seventh anniversary. Kantipur has been one of the most outspoken critics of the royal coup in February, when King Gyanendra seized power and installed royalists as ministers. It has been consistently exposing rights violations and corruption in the new regime. The government says Kantipur FM has been violating a decree by the king that forbids simultaneous transmissions from more than one place.
Officials fear the clashes — so far confined to Karbi Anglong district — could spread to neighboring areas. Feuds are commonplace between militias claiming to represent Assam’s tribes in their conflicting homeland demands. Assam police blame militia groups representing the Karbis and Dimasas for the recent killings and arson attacks on villages. Most of the dead are elderly, women or children. Survivors who have fled the fighting desperately need food, medicine, drinking water and physical security, said Suhas Chakma, director of the Asian Centre of Human Rights. Their situation has been made worse by rains and the constant threat of further attacks. Insecurity and indefinite curfews have forced village markets to close down, leading to food shortages in the area. The dominant f |
The photographs in the story were taken by photographer M. Bukhari (inset), himself an earthquake victim and survivor. Here’s his remarks on how the earthquake affected him: “I am also one of the hundreds of thousands affected by the earthquake. My wife along with my son were in Muzaffarabad, at her parents’ house at the time of the earthquake. Their house was in the heart of the city — called Madina Market, which totally collapsed, including their house too. My son, wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, were all buried in the debris of the collapsed house. My son and brother-in-law were later rescued but everybody else died. As of today, only the dead body of my sister-in-law could be recovered from the debris, the rest of the bodies still could not be found. In my family in total, 10 people died, many were wounded, and about 1,000 became shelter-less.
Biju Mathew of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance said Rahman’s family was praying for his recovery at his bedside at the New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
“We have instructed some of our organizations to go in for imports. We have decided to import from Pakistan through the Wagah border. The prices are high in Pakistan too but we need to take some precautionary measures,” Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said.
