Minutes of the meeting held on January 18, 2003 -by Amrish

Present at the January 18 meeting were:

Sridhar Desikan, Uday Jain, Vinay Iyengar, Sumathi
Iyengar, Dipali Desai, Suren Kapse, Maya Yajnik, 
Purva Basu, Sidhartha Basu, Santanu Chakraborty, Priya
Rajan, Jerome and Hema Kanugo, Chaitanya Guttikar,
Sujit Nair, Manoj M P, Amit Hogadi, Amrish Garg, Kumar
Ramaswamy.

The meeting started by welcoming Jerome and Hema as
new volunteers.

1. Uday and Priya confirmed that the check for the
Khajurdaha project in the amount of $6,000 is being
dispatched.

2. Uday and Priya will prepare the accounts as per the
directive of Pankaj Gupta who will file the
consolidated statement with the IRS.

3. A number of volunteers expressed interest in going
to the U Penn Chapter meeting next week. Please note
that Shankar Krishnan (krishnas@research.att.com,
(973) 660-0336) ) has offered transportation.

4. The welcome package prepared by Kusum for new
volunteers just needs the date when the Princeton
chapter was started. According to Sridhar we started
in August 1998. Amrish has the action item for getting
copies made.

5. The newsletter put together by Santanu is ready for
distribution. Dipali owns the activity. The
fund-raising group will meet for discussions on
Saturday, January 25 at 4:30 PM in Room C207 and will
also ready the newsletters for mailing.

6. Following Manoj's suggestion, volunteers focusing
on the fund-raiser will start meeting at 3:30 PM so
that they have an hour's time before the
project-oriented meeting at 4:30 PM. Volunteers are
welcome to attend one or both meetings. These meetings
will continue to be on the first and third Saturdays
of each month. The fund-raising group may decide to
meet more frequently, if necessary.  The meeting on
Jan. 25 is one such special meeting. Volunteers for
fund-raising include Dipali, Rajesh, Kumar, Sidharth,
Purva, Suren, Sumathi, Kusum, Sudhakar, Santanu,
Anirban, Hansa, Deepa, Vikas, Himanshu, Amrish and all
others who may be interested.

7. Sridhar has volunteered to be the coordinator of
the project-oriented meeting from now on.

8. Amrish updated the status as regards Surbahaar and
Penn Masala groups. We still do not have a firm yes
from Surbahaar but the chances appear to be bright.
Vikas has been talking to Penn Masala and it is up to
us to make up our mind which one we prefer. 

Suren has been talking to several groups and presented
several options. (Sur-Taal-Naad, Sanjiv Ramabhadran,
Prashant Gijre, Archana Joglekar and Jayawant Utpat). 
Out of these, the last one appealed the most to the
audience. Suren described his plan to call the event
Vasantotsav and customize it for Asha. He shared a
poem that he wrote that describes his vision.

It was decided that the fund-raising group would
continue the discussion at the January 25 meeting.

9.    Kumar gave a very interesting talk covering his
Asha-related experiences during his recent trip to
India. He spent 4 days visiting the villages in the
Tiruchendur District of Tamil Nadu where the 7 Asha
Centers are located. These Centers are being supported
through a partnership with the Anawim Trust and the
project is being coordinated by Prof. Rajagopalan of
IOI who had given a talk at our Chapter last year. The
links to the site report are in the e-mail sent by
Manoj to everyone.

Kumar also attended the Asha Conference held at the
Timbaktu Collective in AP and shared some vignettes
from the visit.

Respectfully,

Amrish