Congratulatory messages from NANO Patrons Dr. Shubha Sathyendranath Dear Friends, Lica asked me to write a few words to the NANO community, on the occasion of the 10�� anniversary of NANO. I am happy and honoured to do so. I have watched, mostly from afar the last few years, how this band of ocean scien�sts have grown individually, and collec�vely, through the ac�vi�es of Nippon Founda�on and POGO, and of course, your own efforts and commitment. We have to first of all thank these two organisa�ons that, together, forged a vision of a group of ocean scien�sts who would work together across the globe for the stewardship of the oceans.
Trevor, with trainees and other instructors, at the NF-POGO Visi�ng Professorship in Kochi.
In this context, it would not be amiss to tell you from where I am wri�ng this. I have been in Kochi, India, these last few weeks, and as I write this message, I am not far from the Na�onal Ins�tute of Oceanography, where Trevor Pla� spent some four months as the first NF-POGO Visi�ng Professor in 2004-05. I was the Execu�ve Director of POGO at that �me, and with much guidance and help from many people, but especially Unno-san at the Nippon Founda�on, Saeki-san and Takahashi-san from JAMSTEC, Prof. Howard Roe who was the Chair of POGO at the �me, and of course, Trevor, we had launched the NF-POGO Visi�ng Professorship Programme a few months before that. I confess to feeling very nervous once the programme was launched. I was confident of the grand vision embedded in the programme. But what if the �ming wasn’t right? What if scien�sts of repute didn’t step up to take on the challenge? Then a request came from the regional centre of Na�onal Ins�tute of Oceanography (NIO) in Kochi: Its Scien�st-in-Charge, Dr. KKC Nair, would like to apply to have Prof. Trevor Pla� as their visi�ng professor, and Trevor agreed. I heaved a sigh of relief. I knew then that we were off to a great start.
Trevor and scholars in Kochi
What we didn’t know then was how even�ul the training course was going to be: Trevor, my parents, Mini Raman (one of the trainees, and now a NANO member) and I were on a floa�ng restaurant– it was a pla�orm built on top of empty oil drums lashed together, with walls of glass, every table an aquarium with jewel-like li�le tropical fish swimming around – just outside NIO on Boxing Day in 2004, contempla�ng the view and the lunch menu, and excitedly discussing the sight-seeing trip my parents and I had been on that day (Trevor had not been with us then; he had excused himself and gone to the lab, to prepare for the training course the next day). Our trip to a scenic island had involved a couple of ferry rides, and the changes in sea level in the estuary we experienced had been strange. People in the street had been talking about the mysteries of the ocean and something about “an earthquake in China”. Could it have been a tsunami? Anyway, we thought the experience was behind us, and the idea seemed too far-fetched. There were no reported tsunamis in the Indian Ocean in living memory. Then my mother saw something. “What is that?”, she said, poin�ng to something outside the window. “That” was a foam-topped solitary wave, about a metre high, heading our way. Within seconds, the Indian Ocean tsunami hit us, li�ing the whole structure gently, but the drop back was far from gentle. It sha�ered the panoramic glass walls into a thousand pieces all around us. Luckily for us, the wave had been much a�enuated, otherwise we may not have lived to tell the tale of what it was like, to sit in a bucking, twis�ng, floa�ng, pla�orm. 4
The calm before the storm: view from our flat, on Christmas Eve, 2004. The roof of the floa�ng restaurant is visible in the foreground.
And then the devasta�on. There were many fatali�es in and around Kochi. The survivors were le� with nothing. Even concrete houses were destroyed by the might of the water.
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