Word: nicobars
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When Amitav Ghosh clambers into a tiny relief plane in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, just six days after the 2004 tsunami devastated the area, he finds himself next to a loud, officious-seeming, irascible man in a safari suit, his hair carefully oiled. The visiting writer tries to sidle away, but soon his obstreperous neighbor is sharing his complaints with him. Only as they continue talking does Ghosh begin to realize that the man is, in fact, an epidemiologist, and has lost his wife, his daughter, the whole careful life he has built up, in the tragedy. The loudness...
...died and 6,000 are missing, the government was determined to portray itself as an advanced nation that can manage its troubles and made a point of dispatching its own relief workers to aid other countries in the region. The government was especially sensitive about foreigners invading the Nicobar islands, where the military keeps a secret electronic-listening post. Sparsely populated and almost impossible to reach in normal times, the islands are home to some of the world's last Stone Age tribes--five groups, with populations of 30 to 250, of Pygmy Africans and Mongol hunter-gatherers who stalk...
Across the Nicobars, the International Red Cross estimates a death toll of 30,000 out of a population of 50,000. Meghna Rajsekhar, 13, saw the ocean swallow her mother and father, and after floating at sea for two days on a wooden door, she washed up on a Car Nicobar beach that was swarming with snakes. Newspapers wrote of refugees in Great Nicobar fending off crocodiles as they trekked through the jungle in search of water. For Aisha Majid, the tribal leader of Nancowry, an island filled with the homeless, the government's actions make no sense. She asks...
...This is not a sunburned fancy. Five islands in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, a group of 572 islands about 300 km south of Burma, are being offered to developers by the Indian government in an effort to emulate the success of the Maldives in the tourism industry. New Delhi has decided that private investment is the best and cheapest way to encourage lucrative resort development. Successful bidders will get a 39-year lease and following that, an undisclosed revenue-sharing arrangement...
...military's activities in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has meant that until recently many of them were off-limits to foreign visitors. These days?though perhaps not for much longer?it's possible to stay on a deserted island in the Andamans without booking a bungalow through a luxury resort chain. We left for Port Blair, the capital, intending to spend a week on Smith Island. But by the time we made it up to Diglipur,?a 200-km cross-island excursion involving trucks, buses and boats?to catch the ferry, we found that Smith...