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Indian (dis)connection

Raja Simhan T.E.

CHENNAI, Sept. 12

PANIC-STRICKEN Indians were desperately trying to reach their kith and kin and friends in the US last night.

Ms Srilakshmi Seshadri of Chennai wanted to contact her brother, Mr Srinath Seshadri, living in New Jersey. She tried in vain for more than a couple of hours to get connected. The response was a recorded message saying all the lines were busy.

Dejected and tense, Ms Srilakshmi then decided to try her luck with the e-mail. She sent her brother a message requesting him to reply immediately. To her great relief and to that of her worried parents, her brother responded within a few minutes, saying that he was safe, and there was nothing to worry. Incidentally, Mr Srinath Seshadri was also trying to reach his parents in Chennai, but could not get through.

Like Ms Srilakshmi, there were hundreds of others who turned to e-mail and the chat service available on some of the free e-mail service providers like Hotmail and Yahoo, to communicate with their friends rather than depend on the telephone.

Some of the city's Internet parlours did brisk business last night, with most of the browsers seen chatting with friends in the US, said an owner of a centre.

Ms Srilakshmi said: ``After seeing the footage on television on the attack, everybody in the family was dumbstruck, and did not know what to do. We knew my brother was safe in New Jersey. But, we were still worried, and there was a sense of urgency to ca ll my brother, talk to him and to confirm that he was safe.''

Srilakshmi's friend, Ms Revathy Sharath, living in New York, had a similar experience. Her parents living in Minjur, on the outskirts of Chennai, had a sleepless night on Tuesday, trying desperately to reach her.

Despite several attempts, they were not successful. The recorded voice that all lines were busy greeted them whenever they dialled. It was only when Ms Revathy sent an e-mail to a cousin in Chennai that she was safe did her parents heave a sigh of relief .

An official at VSNL, Chennai, said that on Tuesday, before the attacks, 16,763 call attempts were made to US, of which 9,426 were successful, a 56 per cent success rate.

However, after the attacks, between 8 p.m. and midnight, around 7.5 lakh call attempts were made to the US from South India of which only 2,962 calls were successfully connected, a 0.73 per cent success rate. ``This was the case with all the VSNL centres in the country,'' he said.

According to the official, up to 8 pm on Tuesday, things were smooth. However, after the attack, panic calls started to pour into VSNL, Chennai, which routes all outgoing calls originating from South India. However, the calls could not be routed, as some of the service providers in the US, especially in New York and Washington, D.C., blocked the routers, he said.

``Following the panic calls, our processor was terribly overloaded. We tried to block some routes to the US, took all possible measures to route the outgoing traffic. But such attempts did not yield result. Normalcy was restored only on Wednesday morning ,'' he said. The situation was also similar with incoming calls, he added.

Prakash Swamy reports from New York: As the World Trade Center came down like Niagara Falls tumbling down billowing smoke and heat, Ms Vanaja Parthasarathy, working in the systems division of AIG American International Group Insurance, not far from the t win towers, saw thick smoke outside her ninth floor.

``We thought it was an earthquake and then the building rocked for a second. We all ran out for safety only to see the World Trade Center coming down in rubbles. I used to see the gigantic twin towers every morning when I come to work. What will I see fr om my windows tomorrow?'' she asked.

Ms Parthasarathy was not alone in expressing her anguish. Mr Lalit Shah, an Indian American trader, said: ``It will take a long time for the market to recover, especially at this critical juncture when the stocks are low. Imagine the millions of dollars the insurance companies have to pay for the damage caused to life and property. The closure of markets would have a snow balling effect and push the situation even worse.''

Mr Natarajan Rathnam, President of Fintrack Systems on Broadway, just a block away from Wall Street, said he heard a loud thunder. ``I could feel that something is wrong and boom... the World Trade Center is gone.''

Mr Narayan D. Kesavan, political counsellor to US Senator Gary Ackerman, said the impact of the World Trade Center crash would reverberate in Asia too. ``It's an undeclared war against America by evil forces and the US is bound to retaliate,'' he said. ` `It's time for US to join hands with countries such as India, Israel, Britain and Japan to form a kind of NATO against terrorism.''