“A Familiar Third World Story”

An oddly-titled article, “Katrina sweeps us pride” by Tushar Charan, has been published in the Asian Tribune. The “pride,” I gather, is in regard to how countries in Asia have responded to recent disasters. I was fascinated to see how the Katrina debacle is viewed from foreign shores.

Choice quotes:

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has amply exposed the vulnerability of the United States and showed to the world that the US is more at home attending to problems like deficiency of democracy in distant lands than the travails of disaster victims within its own walls.

And:

People in the condemned Third World need not derive any ‘satisfaction’ from the tragedy in the US. In fact, every country should draw lessons from what Katrina has done to the Americans and why. It appears that it was the system that failed in the US and the poor persons had to pay the price for it. Oh, but that sounds like a familiar third world story.