December 26th marks the one year anniversary of the devastating tsunami that hit South and South-East Asia. Globally it has been a year of immense natural disasters, so it has been hard to keep focus on the long term reconstruction of any single affected area (unless you live there). Luckily there are ever more grassroots efforts by the diaspora community. The tsunami wiped out much of the Sri Lankan healthcare infrastructure, which in turn left children the most vulnerable. Now two U.S. hospitals, Children’s National Medical Center (CNMC) in Washington, D.C. and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (CHP), have joined forces with World Children’s Initiative (WCI), to launch “Project Peds: Sri Lanka Tsunami Relief.” From their press release:

In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, a pediatric cardiologist and a law professor – former college roommates at Brown University – traveled with two other young professionals to the South and East of Sri Lanka. For Dr. Ratnayaka, a Sri Lankan American of Sinhalese descent, and Professor Gulasekaram, a Sri Lankan American of Tamil descent, the mission was to aid family and friends in their motherland. Their multi-ethnic team of volunteers provided direct medical assistance at makeshift treatment centers along the southern coast. They brought school supplies and clothes to orphans on the decimated eastern shore, an area ravaged first by war for the past two decades, then by the tsunami. Though their ethnic communities have been stuck in a bitter civil war for more than two decades, these two men collaborated in their relief efforts as close friends, much the same way they have studied, worked, and socialized together for the past fifteen years even as the bloodletting in their birth nation worsened.

Wanting to do more, the group sought out potential long-term projects for improvement of pediatric health care. The team decided to rehabilitate the pediatric ward at MGH. When they returned to the United States , they assembled a band of more than 20 young professional volunteers — doctors, executives, lawyers and journalists from across the globe — to form WCI and launch Project Peds.

I am just using this one effort as a proxy to highlight the fact that there are still ways to get involved even after you have donated your money to the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, Earthquake in South Asia, etc. I think SM readers are generally more aware than others, but a reminder doesn’t hurt. I would ask that readers use the comments following this post to provide a link to any new organization you know of that was created by the South Asian diaspora as a response to one of the disasters in the past year. Most efforts have been through established organizations but I am sure there may be a few new ones like Project PEDS that could use a shot out for some publicity. Let’s give them some love.

Continue reading →

I had previously blogged about how Indian community leaders in the Virginia suburbs had petitioned to update the textbooks that high school students use. These textbooks are often riddled with gross inaccuracies about India and Hinduism. Parents and community leaders in California have been pursuing a similar goal there, but the results have been mixed and now a significant group has voiced opposition to some changes. This begs a closer look at possible hidden agendas. New American Media reports:

Don’t stand so, Don’t stand so close to me…

Some Hindu and Sikh activists in the U.S. who have been trying in recent months to persuade the California Board of Education to adopt curriculum revisions in textbooks for elementary and middle school students say they are unhappy over the direction their efforts seem to have taken while on the home stretch.

A clutch of academics and historians, who have just recently joined the debate, seems to have neutralized the gains the activists believe they had made. The academics weighed in with their views Nov. 8, which collectively dismiss many of the curriculum changes suggested over the past year by individual Hindus, as well as such organizations as the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Society.

For example, one of the statements Hindu activists want deleted from a social science book is that Aryans were a “part of a larger group of people historians refer to as the Indo-Europeans.”

The activists assert Aryans were not a race, but a term for persons of noble intellect. The academics have urged that this statement not be removed.

In that same book, Hindu activists want the statement, “Men had many more rights than women,” replaced with, “Men had different duties (dharma) as well as rights than women. Many women were among the sages to whom the Vedas were revealed.”

The response from the academics? “Do not change original text.”

It seems that many of the academics and historians that have voiced opposition to certain changes are suspicious of the motives of some of the Hindu activists. This group of academics includes Romila Thapar.

Writing on behalf of the academics, Michael Witzel, a Sanskrit professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., asserted that the groups proposing the changes have a hidden agenda.

“The proposed revisions are not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature, and are primarily promoted by Hindutva supporters and non-specialist academics writing about issues far outside their area of expertise,” Witzel wrote to CBE president Ruth Green in the letter.

Among the 45 or so signatories to his letter are Stanley Wolpert, professor of history at UCLA, and Romila Thapar, India’s well-known historian.

Continue reading →