Katrina ....(Anything but the starlet we Indians know a lot about)

Katrina has become the talk of the town off late. Modeling, acting and having great vitalstatics has helped. Katrina Kaif has taken the Indians by storm and left them tongue tied with her beauty.

On the other side of the globe Katrina has wreaked havoc flooding New Orleans and neighboring areas and leaving tens of thousands of people homeless. It has left 2.5 million people without power. The destruction and forced-closure of oil rigs has resulted in the prices soaring up to 70$ a barrel. Refugees have been put up in stadia, and all kinds of possible places.

According to the engineers of New Orleans, 'the city's flood walls were in excellent shape before the Storm, but weren't designed to withstand a storm of Katrina's magnitude'. So in reality few practical measures were taken to avert a possible damage by storms.

Considering damage and loss of property, the number of people who have lost thier lives has been a very small number. Kudos to the planning and design committee of New Orleans and America. The evacuation procedure was so effective that the number of lives lost was drastically reduced. In the USA each and every life is valued very high and that's the reason for the tremendous and awesome safety measures employed. A similar situation in India would have resulted in an immediate toll of many ten thousands and many more during the period of the long and unplanned rescue operations.

India, a country which is going to become a very strong monetary power by the mid twenty first century, needs to invest more money in such safety measures, in case of a disaster like the Tsunami last year, or the cyclone the hit Orissa in 1999. Let's give our citizens a safe place to live in.