The Burmese Ghost Rafts

The Andaman and Nicobar islands, over the last five years, have seen and increased the interest among the 

Indian population. Its natural beauty and history connected with the freedom movement, and reasonable prices, attracts a large holiday traffic. Most of them visit the regular tourist sites and return. They swim, visit the museum, enjoy  the seafood and think they’ve had a great trip.  

After the tsunami, the Andamans welcomed some strange visitors – the bamboo rafts – fully stocked with seafood, rice, utensils and clothes – but no people. What happened to the people ? And is this a sign for closer ties between the people of Burma and India ?

#Burmese#ghost #rafts#Andaman#Nicobar#Burma#jamshedpur#Dcosta#

The Success of Nano

The Success of Nano

Tata Motors’ launch of Nano in 2011 after enjoying tremendous international publicity, could not transfer this mass awareness into actual sales. It was stated that its sales plummetted to less than a thousand vehicles a month in the last quarter of the year.

There is, however, a bright spot. A vehicle considered to be a small family car, or a replacement for a two-wheeler, has been discovered to be a runaway success in a very unlikely area of India. This odd, puny vehicle which has mismatched front and back wheels and a small two-cylindered engine, has captured the hearts of petty businessmen in the hills of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Sikkim. It has conquered the two most challenging, and punishing accesses to Darjeeling. On the Teesta to Darjeeling slope upwards, where a wrong change of gear can make the vehicle roll down backwards, this little dream on wheels whizzes up with 4 passengers competing with its Goliath-like SUV brothers.

It seems like the financial purchasing package created the niche. Rs. 25,000 down payment and a Rs. 2,500 EMI tempted budding tour entrepreneurs to take the plunge. The agile performance of the vehicle, its reliability and certainly its fuel economy, have made it a runaway success. Tata Motors must take advantage of this niche segment success and search for other geographical areas to implement it.

Gerald Durrell

7 January 1925 - 30 January 1995

Gerald Malcolm Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar Province, India, on 7 January 1925, the fourth surviving child of Louisa Florence Durrell (née Dixie), aged thirty-eight, and Lawrence Samuel Durrell, forty, a civil engine. Following the death of his father in 1928 the family moved back to the UK, but spurred on by Gerald’s oldest brother, Lawrence, they soon returned to a warmer climate, this time the island of Corfu er.

By 1918 Lawrence Samuel was Chief Engineer with the Darjeeling and Himalaya Railway on the India-Tibet border, leaving two years later to found his own company — Durrell & Co., Engineers and Contractors — in the new industrial boom town of Jamshedpur, planned and built as a `garden city' by the giant Tata Iron and Steel Company, but in those days a raw-edged place in the middle of a hot, dusty plain. In the four years preceding Gerald's birth he became one of the fat cats of British India, successful, rich — and desperately overworked.

Most of the major construction projects that Durrell & Co. helped to build in Jamshedpur still stand today, among them extensions to the Tata works, the Tinplate Company of India, the Indian Cable Company, the Enamelled Ironware Company and much else beside, including `Beldi', the home in which Gerald was born and in which he spent the first years of his life. `Beldi' was a regulation D/6 type bungalow in European Town, Jamshedpur, a residence appropriate to Lawrence Samuel Durrell's status as a top engineer — a rung or two below the Army and the Indian Civil Service, a rung or two above the box-wallahs and commercials. It was not grand, but it was comfortable, with cool, shuttered rooms, a large veranda with bamboo screens against the heat of the sun, and a sizeable garden of lawn, shrubs and trees, where Gerry the toddler took his first steps.