10 MARCH 2013 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG in those rice fields in West Java and West Bengal. People aren’t plankton. It was about the people of the places we loved. I grew to LOVE this man for everything he stood for, for all the good he taught me about his world, the amazing progress he made in Cambodia and elsewhere, and all the good he told me about India. I was blessed to visit there and experience the magic and mess of a place like Calcutta through his eyes. Nandeesha was a second Gandhi to me. When together we talked about what it was like to grow up poor in the East and the West and how people escape their upbringings. He didn’t know that there were poor people in the immigrant towns of America and I had no idea of what India and the billions of poor really had to endure. I honor the life of this man in so many ways. Nandeesha’s work in Asia was pioneering, exceptional, and formative. Cambodia gave Nandeesha the Sahameitrei Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to developing sustainable small-scale aquaculture programs in 2008. As he became globally known, he became an ambassador for doing good things for the poor. Research never really impressed him nor did all of the mega-traveling he did for so many organizations. He only did that to earn money to give away to poor people doing aquaculture when he came back home to Asia. The travel did bring joy but too much stress to him and I was always concerned about him over this last decade whenever we met. My memory of my friend Nandeesha will be of an exceptional man who shared the view that aquaculture could help save the world. I grew to love Nandeesha as more than a friend. He became a mentor who always brought me back to reality. He grew into a wise man of deep insight who tried to do more than was humanly possible in one day, one month, and one year for the poor, rural families he loved. He wanted us to know it was important to save the poor from another day worse than his. It’s tough for me knowing that Nandeesha has passed, that we can’t hold hands anymore. He would want me/us not to dwell on his passing. He’d want us to hold hands more and, I can hear him saying, “Get to work for the world’s poor.” Barry Costa-Pierce University of New England Biddeford, Maine, USA It is with a very heavy heart that I write this brief tribute for Dr. M.C. Nandeesha, following his tragic and untimely demise. Nandeesha and I were colleagues and friends since we first met in the early 1990s in Cambodia, where he was working for an NGO to promote rural aquaculture. As we both work in Asian aquaculture, we had been in continual contact over the years, most recently in Tuticorin where he had been the Dean of Fisheries and had organized a meeting of all the deans of fisheries colleges in India to start the process of standardizing fisheries and aquaculture curricula throughout the country. Nandeesha had a highly productive career and especially so in promoting aquaculture for the disadvantaged poor households and women in Southeast and South Asia. He was a scholar, researcher, and educator as well as a development specialist with many years of grass-roots experience in the field in several countries. Nandeesha was a first-class ambassador for aquaculture in general and for WAS in particular, in which he had been very active, recently seeking the presidency. He had boundless energy and enthusiasm and was incredibly helpful to colleagues who sought specific knowledge or assistance, invariably responding to emails. We have lost one of our most cherished colleagues. Peter Edwards, Emeritus Professor Asian Institute of Technology Bangkok, Thailand The sad demise of my great friend Nandeesha (as he was always known to Westerners) is a great loss, both personally and for the not-for-profit organization Aquaculture without Frontiers (AwF) [www.aquaculturewithoutfrontiers.org]. Nandeesha was a founding member of AwF in 2003 and was extremely active in its early field days, with his personal and particular involvement in our Bishramganj project in India and in our joint project with Caritas in Bangladesh. Typically generous, not only with his ‘free’ time but also financially, Nandeesha several times used funds earned through his consultancy work for other organizations to fund small AwF projects. Eventually he became the third chairman of AwF but I fear that he did so because he was never able to say the word ‘no.’ Nandeesha was active in so many other aquaculture fields
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