Friday TILIP

Gowher Rizvi spoke of "The Future of India". Interesting, good background for what was to come on other panels.

Next was Fighting the Tide: Responding to Pandemics
Pramit Mitra spoke of the AIDS Epidemic in India. It was not something I'd given a lot of thought to. He wants more attention paid to AIDS prevention and education because as India becomes more industrialized AIDS is spreading. However, I never get when the AIDS prevention people try to equate the attention paid or money allocated to their cause with other diseases. In this case Mitra was trying to say that AIDS was getting zero attention and a lot was being paid to polio and tuberculosis. But polio and tuberculosis are bigger problem in terms of contagion and incidence, they should get more money. Plus one of the advisors from Annapolis (there are more than a dozen Mids and Cadets and their faculty advisors attending) , who was clearly Indian corrected him. Mitra relented somewhat and conceeded there was a public education campaign, but he countered by saying it needed to be more. Well, of course, he's going to say that.
Then, came bird flu. The presenter Zongchao Peng. I understood ecery fifth word and his power point was not translated very well. Sorry, I am the Ugly American. I had a hard time staying awake. I believe his conclusion was that the US is doing a better job than China, but both countries were being held back by a natural tendency of human to look on the bright side.

Next panel was "China and India: Up-close and Personal". Now this was good! This was my favorite segment yesterday. Tarun Khanna was engaging, informative, smart and funny.

Then I dashed over to Grace's and raided her fridge, caused chaos.....the usual. There was one panel left at 7 pm.

Asia's Rising Giants: China and India
Favorite speaker.....duh.....Will Arnest, Midshipman, Third Year, United States Naval Academy. LOL, the kid did a good job, but no power point.........I thought the Navy was all about the Power Point?
Steven Weisman was smarmy and managed to slip in some nonsense about the Clinton impeachment proceedings avtually being about Republican displeasure with Clinton reaching out to China..........what?