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THE JOURNEY
93
Around the world by ship
In 1964, we went on a round-the-world trip by sea. Sincel was not flying, for almost 18 years from 1950 to 1968, I would either travel by trains or drive. From Rockford, I sent my wife and Darshana to Las Vegas promising to join them the next day. In Las Vegas, they all went out for shopping at around 11 am to find all shops shut! In Las Vegas people live' at night! The city comes alive only after nightfall. From there we drove down to San Francisco. On the way, a cop stopped me for over-speeding. I was just following the car in front. Though the cop caught me, he let the other car go. Normally, he would have noted down my address and driving license number and sent me a notice. But I told him honestly that I was a visitor and would be leaving the city soon hoping he would let me off, but he didn't. Though it was a Sunday, he took me to the next village and called the Sheriff, who came to the office and fined me 35 dollars. I ended up wasting two hours by being honest! My daughter Darshana decided to fly back to London from there to resume her studies while we went ahead with our tour.
We took the ship President Lines from San Francisco to Hawaii, where we had a stopover, and then sailed to Yokohama in Japan. We had another stopover at Taipei in Taiwan. I still remember the lunch we had had at a restaurant belonging to Madame Chiang Kai Sek (Chiang Kai Sek was the President of Taiwan at the time). It was the finest Chinese vegetarian meal I've ever had. From Taipei we went to Saigon in Vietnam where a civil war was on, and then to Singapore, where I got a message from my son Nirmal requesting us not to return to Mumbai as scheduled as he was busy with This Matriculation exam. He suggested that we stop over in Colombo and take a train to Mumbai. We took a boat from Colombo to Rameshwaram, where our car was waiting for us. We drove to Periyar Lake, Periyar Sanctuary, Kochi and Chennai before returning to Mumbai.
In 1962 1 had gone alone to the US on a hurried business mission. I had to contact our collaborators at our Hindustan Polymer factory in Vizag. We had made R.K.Parikh, General Manager, Shree Ram Mills, the Executive Director of Hindustan Polymers. He had arranged for a collaboration with Distillers Limited in the UK for manufacturing polystyrene, and with Universal Oil
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing -
Edmund Burke
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