When the Governors and even President ("The relief work is unacceptable") engage in blame game, to evade their own responsibility in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, I am reminded of Edwards Deming, the American responsible for Japanese industrial renaissance, who used to say "Every Crisis is a Problem of Leadership".

What They Aren't Telling about New Orleans

• That many people arranged and attended "Hurricane Parties" instead of taking safety precautions
• Everybody was told to evacuate as in "Load your SUV and check into a Hotel in a neighboring State", without actual understanding of the problem that many in New Orleans were tourists without transportation or poor people without cars. And how are people in hospitals and nursing homes supposed to evacuate?
• If you see the TV coverage, it is obvious that most of the victims as black, so are the looters. Racial angles to a natural disaster, anyone? Racial angles to the relief operation, anyone?
• Numerous occasions, looting by victims was allowed as an incentive to "keep quiet", because the supplies were in short supply
• Due to the automated way the utility and credit card bills are processed, all those bills are being sent to non-existing addresses, and soon all those victims' phones and cards won't work anymore because "last statement was not paid".
• Families with extra rooms in their homes are afraid to host the families who have lost their homes for fear of safety, and lack of "trust factor". See racial angle from above.

Amma's Column: The Midwife of Honavar. I knew Anmori only during her last years. She was a wonderful woman. If I can be useful to the society a fraction of what Anmori was, I'd consider my life a success.

The Vijaya Karnataka newpaper (a Kannada language daily) has launched an electronic version (Registration required). What I liked about it is the choice they offer to the readers (different versions of PDF, text or image) to browse the content in an Indian language.

National Geographic: With WildCam take an African safari from the luxury of your home (requires Real player). Amazing.

The funny part is, I have been recieving a lot of traffic for the RSS feed -- not for what it was meant, but it seems to be a top match for "XML Parsing Error".

Today's Star of Mysore (an evening English daily in the city of Mysore) features contributions of my mother to the city.

Over the years Amma has gotten recognition as a historian, as a humorist, as a writer, and as a non-creative scholar, but never as an administrator, something she excelled at for thirty five years at the All India Radio, in the period before there was TV or Internet in India, often in adverse conditions. So I was absolutely delighted to read this "The Voice behind the Voices" piece by a veteran biographer (HSK).

Also read in context, Amma's Memoirs of Mysore.

Many thanks to patron Ganesh Prasad Katte for pointing out. Apparently Star of Mysore newpaper doesn't keep archives so I have cached a faithful copy here.

Benefiting from Friend's Goodwill

It is so good to have admirers all over the world. A researcher was appalled to find one of Amma's articles published in a scholarly journal in another person's name!

Amma's research is neither cited, nor acknowledged. Some sentences have been copied word-to-word!

Of course, I am going to take action. Especially since the publisher is supposed be a cash rich, reputed publisher of scholarly information.

Perhaps the author thought that a website is too lowly a resource to acknowledge in a scholarly article? She didn't think it was lowly when stealing from it...

Amit Guha, a long time visitor has started Kala Darshana a website on India's art history. Check out the beautiful photographs.