December 27, 2004

Tsunami struck

tsunami.png
It is an eerie feeling to read about a major calamity, especially so if it has struck close to home. The first thing I did was to take stock of the closed ones; having been blessed, the attention turns to immediate victims and try to identify means by which to relate to their sorrows and find means of helping them. No amount of prior reading of Baghavad Gita and Shankara helps. Rationally it may be Maya; but when you are engulfed in it, it sure feels real.

Then sorrow turns to desperation and then anger. If you feel it is unseemly to express anger this early, please stop reading further. But my feelings are strong and are felt for a long period of time. I read that usually it takes a long time for tsunami to hit after an event like earthquake. In this case, there was at least 2 hours notice and one could walk away from it in about 15 minutes. How can a nation that is IT for the whole world couldn’t spread this information? Wouldn’t a simple RSS feed have done the trick. Somebody with a bullhorn on the Marina beach might have saved more than a handful. The government failed big time. But nothing in India is straight forward. The sightseeing public that thronged to the beach area were hampering rescue efforts. Law enforcement authorities were frustrated, but couldn’t control the crowd. Does the Police know only “lathi charge” and live bullets to control the bullets? Would the public have heeded warnings issued by the officials?

Let me conclude this tirade with a constructive suggestion. We should require from wireless operators an SMS service something like an “inverse 911” service. With this service, the government will be able to broadcast emergency announcement using SMS to all cell phones. The message must be easily identified to be an emergency message and of course it couldn’t be spammed.

Posted by aswath at December 27, 2004 09:42 PM
Related Posts Widget for Blogs by LinkWithin
If you do not have an OpenID, then please use www.enthinnai.com/unauopenid/anyblog.

 

Comments



Copyright © 2003-2014 Moca Educational Products.