All ye cheapo desis (sore over the $44 British Airways fiasco), here’s some good news for y’all.
Southwest Airlines today announced a fare sale that lets customers purchase one-way travel for $25, $50, $75, or $100 depending on length of their trip.
* Travel up to 375 miles for $25 one-way
The Pierre Hotel, a major NYC landmark, has reopened recently after a $100 million renovation by its Indian owners, Taj Hotels Resorts & Palaces.
Located near Central Park at 5th Avenue and 61 St, the Pierre offers 189 redesigned residential-style guest rooms, including 49 suites.
Pierre, New York City
(Pix: Taj Hotels web site)
Since we have more time than we know what to do with, we played around with booking a Grand 1-Bdrm Suite at the Pierre for September 24 for just one night.
Folks, the rack rate shown us was $13,772.30 (no typo here) for one night.
Cheap, na?
Wonder if that is the Presidential Tata Suite (contains handcrafted artworks by artisans from Paramparik Karigar)?
Or was it the less regal Rajput Suite (bed-frame hand-finished with centuries-old Zardosi embroidery)?
India has been a dismal failure at attracting foreign tourists compared to even tiny nations like Croatia.
Frequent terrorist bombings in major Indian tourist hubs like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore et al, the global recession and rape and murder of tourists must surely be causing nightmares to the somnolent pen-pushers in India’s moribund Ministry of Tourism.
As if the bombings and violent assaults on tourists were not bad enough, there’s the shockingly pathetic tourist infrastructure for travelers daring to visit India.
Now in what seems like a desperate bid to bring in tourists, India’s inept Ministry of Tourism is laying it on thick with a host of incentives via dull campaigns in magazines like the New Yorker.
Here are some of the bribes India is offering these days to draw foreign tourists:
* One complimentary companion Air Ticket
* One day’s complimentary hotel stay
* One complimentary sight seeing tour in a city of your choice (or so they say)
* One complimentary rural eco-holiday at any of 15 locations
(Source: New Yorker, April 20, 2009, P.44-45)
The freebies are being offered under
Time for the next instalment of Incredible India, those Only-in-India stories.
Here we go:
* Holy cow, unholy representation in the Holy City. What does it take to be the BSP’s Lok Sabha candidate for the holy city of Varanasi? Over two dozens cases including murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping, extortion, loot and land grabbing. Our candidate Mukhtar Ansari will contest the upcoming election from Gazipur jail, where he’s lodged now for the alleged murder of BJP-MLA Krishnanand Rai.
* Foreign tourists to India have never had it so bad. They are raped, murdered, cheated, assaulted et al, merely for the sin of coming to India. Now foreign tourists are so sick of the crimes against them that the other day some of them staged a protest march in Gaya in the North Indian state (or sewer) of Bihar. No kidding. Here’s an excerpt from the TOI story:
In perhaps the first protest of its kind, a group of foreign tourists took out a protest march in Bodh Gaya, on Saturday to register protest against incidents of crime, including road robberries targeting visitors from abroad.
The placard-carrying protesters also silently walked around Mahabodhi temple, the seat of Buddha’s enlightenment. The protesters from countries like Belgium, Canada and Mexico also demanded the deployment of “tourist police†to gain the confidence of visitors and prevention and detection of crime.
M Mariya, a visitor from Mexico, told mediapersons that some of her friends visited Bodh Gaya a couple of months back and stayed on the Root Institute Campus. One evening when the tourists came out of the Institute, a group of road robbers overpowered them and demanded money. When the visitors told the road robbers they were not carrying wallets, one of the tourists was made hostage while others were freed to fetch money and the hostage was freed when payment was made.
* You say there’s a backlog of 2.5 crore cases in various Indian courts, right. Who gives a damn. The Madras High Court has worked only nine days this year.
The latest instalment of Incredible India focuses on the atrocities by the Indian police and starts with an Only-in-India story of the rape of a rape victim by the police (no typo there, we mean rape of a rape victim).
* Anyone who is the least bit familiar with India knows that many members of the Indian police are the worst criminals, Pigs in Khaki Uniform. But the latest incident in Uttar Pradesh shows the extent of their depravity. After a rape victim (a minor Dalit girl) was brought to the Ferozabad police station, instead of sending the girl to the hospital for treatment the local police chief took the poor victim to his house on the pretext of taking her statement and raped her. After an internal police investigation found the police inspector guilty, he has been sacked.
* The Hindu is reporting that policemen in Balrampur beat a a Dalit woman to death.
* Drunken cops beat up train passengers on the down Kalka-Howrah Mail.
* A few days back, Indian policemen brutally thrashed a six-year-old girl
We are starting a regular segment called Incredible India that’ll highlight incredible stories and facts that can only be Made in India.
Here’s a selection of some of the incredible stories and facts to come out of Incredible India:
* Two minor Indian girls were married to frogs in a remote village of Villupuram District in Tamil Nadu.
In a bizarre ritual, two minor girls, both seven, from the remote Pallipudupet village in Tamil Nadu’s Villupuram district were married off to frogs on Friday night. The ceremony, an annual feature during the Pongal (harvest) festival, is conducted “to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village”.
The girls, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, dressed up in traditional bridal finery — gilded sarees and gold jewellery — married the frog ‘princes’ in separate,
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