A conservative view on history as we make it

Friday, September 29, 2006

Only the NY Times....

NEW DELHI, Sept. 28 — The quest for water can drive a woman mad.

Ask Ritu Prasher. Every day, Mrs. Prasher, a homemaker in a middle-class neighborhood of this capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about water.
It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not a drop will come. So Mrs. Prasher will have to call a private water tanker, wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no water arrives.

“Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,” a weary Mrs. Prasher, 45, recounted one morning this summer, cellphone in hand and ready to press redial for the water tanker. “You become so edgy all the time.”

In the richest city in India, with the nation’s economy marching ahead at an enviable clip, middle-class people like Mrs. Prasher are reduced to foraging for water. Their predicament testifies to the government’s astonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India asserts itself as a global power.

The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006




In a ceremony at McChord Air Force Base, Wash., on Monday with Air Force Reserve personnel, a flag was placed in the ground to represent each person killed on Sept. 11 in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

Nation Marks Lives Lost and Hopeful Signs of Healing

Once more the leaden bells tolled in mourning, loved ones recited the names of the dead at ground zero, and a wounded but resilient America paused yesterday to remember the calamitous day when terrorist explosions rumbled like summer thunder and people fell from the sky.

On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, as most Americans went about their Monday routines, thousands gathered at ground zero, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania where the hijacked jetliners crashed. They included families and friends of the 2,973 people who died, President Bush and other public officials, and countless strangers united by haunting but receding memories.

 
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