Word: singhs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...minister in Madhya Pradesh, is outraged by the product. He claims the vibrating ring qualifies not as a contraceptive but as a sex toy - illegal in his state - and has accused Hindustan Latex, and by extension India's national government, of immorality. In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this week calling for a ban on the sale of the condoms, Vijayavargiya says the government "has disregarded rules, regulations, the country's laws and morality. Sex toys can have serious repercussions on the Indian way of life...
...Kesri Singh, the "thakur" of the erstwhile kingdom of Mandawa, looks like an old-fashioned Indian maharajah. Over six feet tall, with a barrel chest and imperious paunch, he wears the upturned bristly gray moustache that his father and grandfather sported in their own time to mark their nobility. That much is clear from the oil paintings that loom behind Singh on a hot early morning on the verandah of his 71-room hotel, the Castle Mandawa, in the northwestern Indian region of Rajasthan...
...arid northwestern state of India for decades. But there is a difference, at least in this remote Shekhawati region of Rajasthan where Mandawa sits, a scorching five-and-half-hour drive through the desert from New Delhi. But rather than reminisce about the martial adventures of his forefathers, Kesri Singh is preoccupied these days with his former subjects, the "Marwari" merchants who were once moneylenders and traders in the dusty camel-filled town that sprawls around the ramparts of his castle. "We gave them military protection," he says wistfully of the Marwaris who served his forefathers. "We gave them...
...fortunes of the Marwaris grew, so did their cultural and social clout. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mandawa. Those who brave its blistering summer heat, these days, come as much for the seven-foot-thick turrets and spiked elephant gate of Kesri Singh's magnificent 18th-century castle as for the painted houses left behind by the Marwaris. Called "havelis," painting the walls and ceilings of their ancestral houses became a way for the strictly vegetarian Marwaris to show off a little. The ceiling of one such haveli, for example, shows the flute-playing Hindu god Krishna frolicking...
...Even Kesri Singh appears to realize that the key to prosperity lies outside his parched kingdom, making more frequent trips to Calcutta (now renamed Kolkata) to raise capital for his expanding operations. "He never used to go before," observes Arvind Sharma, one of Singh's former employees, now a rival hotelier in Mandawa. But how will the wealthy Marwaris of Kolkata treat the scion of their erstwhile liege? Will they remember the bad old days when their families clung to the walls of his castle, treated with scorn as grubby moneylenders? "No, no, we treat all maharajahs with great respect...