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PM shares pains of Indians at WTC

PM shares pains of Indians at WTC

Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: September 13, 2002
 
Visa, it's available for everywhere you want to be, except the United States.

The take-off on the familiar credit card slogan could well be the cruel joke on the families and dependents of several 9/11 Indian victims who trooped in to the New York Palace Hotel on Wednesday evening to meet Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee.

They spoke of the pain of losing their loved ones, the turmoil in their lives, and the difficulty they were having in staying in or returning to the US to salvage their remains. Shefali Agarwal is a typical case. Her husband Alok Agarwal was working with the firm Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center when it was hit, decimating the entire office.

She was on a dependant visa and visiting India with her son Ankur When the tragedy occurred. They lost their status, and are now here on a short-term visitor visa, even though they say they need to be in the US to salvage the bits and pieces of their lives.

Ankur, a bouncy, precocious kid of ten, wants to stay in the US and continue his schooling at New Jersey Although he read out a poem about how proud he was to be an Indian, he says he wants to be in America because of its beauty and its freedom.

Indian-American Vasantha Vyalakur has a different kind of visa problem. She lost her husband Sankara Vyalakur, who worked for more than two, decades as an auditor for the New York State Taxes and Finance Department located in WTC II. Now she is all alone and would like her married niece to visit her from India to keep her company for some weeks. The visa has been denied twice.

US lawmakers, including India Caucus Frank Pallone, have Promised to introduce legislation to give permanent resident status to dependents of Indian WTC victims. No word on if or when it will come through.

Some 200 Indians, including temporary workers, NRIs and PIOs, are thought to have lost their lives in the WTC collapse. Only about 20 were Indian passport holders and most of their families were flown in from India by the American Red Cross. Some of them brought "Ganga Jal" (water from the River Ganga) to sprinkle on Ground Zero while other carried bits of earth from the site to scatter it in India.

Some came not for visa but for the vision. "I wanted to see the place where he worked. He had such a wonderful life ahead of him", Venkatasubba Reddy of Cuddapah said of his son Kiran Kumar before choking up.

Kiran was working as a software engineer with the firm Marsh and McLennan on the 96th floor of the North Tower when it was struck by the aircraft flown by Mohammed Atta.
 


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