India India Echo
My husband and I have a deep connection to India. As longtime students of eastern philosophy, we're interested in ancient Vedic culture and its modern forms, which we also teach here in North America. My husband has traveled to India many times, living there for extended periods during the 70's and 80's.
From our home in Canada, for the last 15 years we've published a website that serves the worldwide community of Vedic philosophy enthusiasts, and for the last 5 years we've published a daily online newspaper that gets about 2.6 million hits/month. While many of these readers are in India, thousands of them reside elsewhere on the globe, on every continent.
One of the common threads shared by members of our extended community is a belief in 'simple living, high thinking'. Many live in off-the-grid homesteads or in small sustainable rural communities. In India, of course, some live in extremely busy cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Calcutta, but a surprising number live in very remote places, in the interior jungles, northern deserts, or along the extensive stretches of coastline.
Ham radio is a natural fit for many in our global community because of their living circumstances, where off-grid communication systems are highly valued and often mission critical. Unfortunately, there hasn't yet been a coordinated effort to put all these Hams in touch with one another, establish nets, or clubs, or joint activities. As publishers of an established news venue in the community, it seems like a natural fit for us to take that task on, and it's one of the main reasons I recently set out to get my Ham license.
I still don't know much about how contests are operated in the Ham community, but it sounds like a vibrant part of amateur radio club culture. I look forward to helping organize and participating in contests that will focus on connecting with the Indian Ham community, in whatever form that takes.
In India, because of the ancient religious culture, many Ham activities like Foxhunts and DXing are focused on temples and shrines. There are literally millions of them, some very prominent tourist destinations, but most hidden away in deep jungles, all along the Ganges and up into the Himalayas. People all over the world who are members of the extended Vedic community have read about so many of these ancient monuments, but aren't able to travel there personally. So hopefully we'll be able to organize Ham contests that inspire our friends in India to set-up stations at some of these places so all the rest of us can make contact and have our own experience of connecting.
Another common thread we share with the Indian Ham community is on the preparedness front. Compared to many parts of India, we're safe and secure here in Canada from great natural disasters. India faces them each year in the form of epic floods brought on by monsoon rains and cyclones in the low-lying Ganges basin. In 2006, the southern states were devastated by the great Tsunami. The picture below was taken just a few days before a disastrous event. The woman giving the training session on Ham protocol to her young protégées from the Andaman Islands is Bharathi, VU2RBI. Looks like they were enjoying the lesson, and I'm sure they put the skills to good use in the critical days that followed.
We look forward to exchanging information with our friends in India on how to apply Ham communications in emergency situations, and no doubt we'll all learn a few new tricks.
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