Posted on 12/30/2004 12:21:45 PM PST by smag499
NEW DELHI: After the storm comes the deluge of questions. What if the government is understating the scale of the tragedy? How is India going about the woeful task of counting the dead? In turn, how will this affect relief mobilisation and disbursal of financial aid?
Already there are indications that the number of dead projected by authorities is way below the reality. Senior officials in Delhi are already admitting that the task before them is very complicated.
Red Cross is estimating the toll could shoot up to 1,00,000 dead (from the present 80,000) in Asia once more information comes in from Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Andamans are situated just north of Sumatra, the epicentre of Sunday's quake that set off the killer waves.
Residents in several affected areas are already claiming that the number of dead projected by authorities is far way below the reality.
Title is not the original, one million does not appear in the article.
Not a bit, but that's ok. :)
Ping to #38.
Hmmm. Well, there have it.
So id advise you to get admins to change the title of the thread.Anyway the article was put out in the morning & is dated.The hundred thousand figure(1 lakh) it predicted has already jumped to 125,000.
More clear. As you pointed it out it was for an Indian audience. Had they sad Lakh, we'd have asked what that is and then been told 100,000. Then we'd know, but that 1,00,000 is confusing.
This is certainly not a laughing matter, but I gotta admit, the wording you caught is jaw-droppingly hilarious.
It might be for you,but for the 350-400 odd million Indians who know or use English,it's perfectly clear!!!
Here is a link of various disasters in history, including natural....
http://www.geocities.com/dtmcbride/hist/disasters-war.html
Puts things in perspective.
War, terror, disasters...next come famine, plague, disease...and Bush doesn't respond quickly enough!
I am gobsmacked by your naivety.
Yep. The rest of the world will just brush over the number anyway.
Disaster; Ason; Catastrofa; Armagedon.
Those are the only words which I can think about.
Wait a minute. English? The Lakh is English?
Thank you! Very helpful, indeed.
Looks like a good site, but sadly it's exceeded its bandwidth. It says in an hour it should be up again though.
GEeeeeees!!I mean't all that all those Indians who read English papers will understand it.The Lakh probably came into existence during the time of the Mughals(im not sure of it),so it's probably derived from Persian or Hindi.I must add that with Indian English catching on,the Lakh too has become rather common in certain literary circles in the UK.
I know this is trivial given the magnitude of this tragedy and the fact that the count is already well over 100,000 and rising, but to clear up any confusion on the India Times article...
In India they use commas in numbers differently than we do. 1,00,000 = 100000; they refer to 100000 as '1 lakh' and put the comma there to denote the # of "lakhs".
They don't use the terms "millions" and "thousands" in India. They use "lakh" (=100 thousand) and "crore" (which equals 10 million).
We put our commas in such a way as to easily identify "thousands" and "millions". They put the
commas so as to make it easy to identify lakhs and crores.
My wife is Indian and speaks and writes English better than most of my employees and many of the people that I know. They start learning English very early.
I think that might be 100,000.
The loss of every human life is sadly missed by someone.
Much easier to understand when the commas are left out. in fact the online dictionary doesn't use commas either.
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