oh india

i am a volunteer at the local Asha for education chapter. i joined it in the first year out of curiosity/boredom on that particular weekend and have been actively involved in various fund raising events ever since. beyond that i dont know why i joined. i notice that many indian students in the united states are part of such organizations (Asha, AID, etc.) Interesting given that very few of us did any social volunteering while in india. not that i or others did not have time while in india. anyone saying that would be bsing through their mouths. is it some kind of guilt complex? i dont know.
anyway....Asha was rated as the top charity organisation by a neutral body called charity navigator. so in case you have a chapter around you...join it. or at least give your money (-:

one thing that struck me while reading the charity navigator website was the fact that two indian charities are in the top 5. both are entirely volunteer run and have no paid employees. and both have extremely high standards and excellent "returns on investment". they both have budgets of around a million (roughly). the american charities listed there have ceos, excellent quality and budgets of 100s of millions of dollars!

so, despite all this progress , or is it talk of progress?, india is still a few orders of mangitude lower in development indices. heres one that shocked me when i first heard it. the number of domestic airline tickets sold from march 2004 to march 2005 in india grew 10 odd percent over the prior fiscal to 16 million tickets. thats the number of tickets sold in the united states in 5 days!!