First post!

Dear Friends,



My father, David Albert, and I have started this blog as a way of 

reporting back from South India, where we are going later today. 

Sunday morning, I woke up to the news that a giant earthquake and 

tsunami had hit the area where my adopted grandparents and other 

friends and relatives live and work. Since then, we have decided 

that we will still go, and help in any way possible. Our greatest 

strength is perhaps our ability to get the word out about what is 

going on there.



A bit of background is probably needed regarding my connections to 

this area of Tamil Nadu. My grandparents, S. and Krishnammal 

Jagannathan, are Gandhian land reform organizers who have worked 

for more than 50 years on getting land for the impoverished people 

of South India. Lately, they have had to contend with multinational 

corporations who have moved in and built shrimp farms along the 

coast, salinating the soil, polluting the water, and wiping out 

fish populations, in this district that depends entirely upon 

agriculture and fishing. They corporations also have cut down most 

of the mangrove forests, the only protection against cyclones and 

tsunamis. Krishnammal and Jagannathan's son, Bhoomikumar, works in 

Cambodia as a child psychiatrist working with war victims, and 

their daughter, Sathya, runs the pediatric section of a hospital 

in the town of Chengalpattu. The extraordinary lives of Krishnammal 

and Jagannathan have been recorded in my Dad's book, The Color of 

Freedom.



My Dad met Krishnammal and Jagannathan (or, as they are commonly 

known, Amma and Appa, which mean "mother" and "father" in Tamil) 

in the 70s, at a United Nations training seminar, and they mutually 

adopted each other. I first met them when I visited India at the 

age of three, and I still have a vague memory of meeting 

Jagannathan in jail. I visited again in 1998, when I was 11.



I know that all of the people I know personally in India are fine, 

but the devastation there must be immense. Thank you all for your 

thoughts and prayers.



In the Light,



Aliyah Shanti



If you want to contact us, our email is shantinik@earthlink.net. 

My Dad's website is http://www.skylarksings.com/. 

Copies of The Color of Freedom and more information on Amma and 

Appa can be found there.