AHMEDABAD, India // An Indian diamond trader has thrown a mass wedding ceremony for 111 fatherless women and given each one gifts worth thousands of dollars, saying giving a bride away was “sacred”.
Mahesh Savani said the women, whose families were all too poor to finance their weddings, saw him as their foster father.
The 44-year-old said he had given each one gifts of gold and other items worth $7,250 to start their married lives, as well as paying for the wedding.
“Material gifts are not important, but I have given my name to them and will fulfil all my responsibilities as a father of the bride for the rest of my life,” he said before the ceremony was held at a school in Gujarat state on Sunday.
Mr Savani, who has now organised the weddings of 251 women, said he began his charitable campaign in 2008 when one of his own staff members died.
“I was very shocked when one of my employees died just 12 days before he could marry off his two daughters. It was very difficult for the family to arrange for marriage,” he said.
“So I decided that I would become their foster father and marry them off. This is how it began,” Mr Savani said.
It is not known how much the giant ceremony wedding cost, but Indian weddings are famous for their grand scale with multi-course feasts, decorated horses, brass bands and huge tents arranged to entertain hundreds or even thousands of guests.
* Agence France-Presse
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Iran's dirty tricks to dodge sanctions
There’s increased scrutiny on the tricks being used to keep commodities flowing to and from blacklisted countries. Here’s a description of how some work.
1 Going Dark
A common method to transport Iranian oil with stealth is to turn off the Automatic Identification System, an electronic device that pinpoints a ship’s location. Known as going dark, a vessel flicks the switch before berthing and typically reappears days later, masking the location of its load or discharge port.
2. Ship-to-Ship Transfers
A first vessel will take its clandestine cargo away from the country in question before transferring it to a waiting ship, all of this happening out of sight. The vessels will then sail in different directions. For about a third of Iranian exports, more than one tanker typically handles a load before it’s delivered to its final destination, analysts say.
3. Fake Destinations
Signaling the wrong destination to load or unload is another technique. Ships that intend to take cargo from Iran may indicate their loading ports in sanction-free places like Iraq. Ships can keep changing their destinations and end up not berthing at any of them.
4. Rebranded Barrels
Iranian barrels can also be rebranded as oil from a nation free from sanctions such as Iraq. The countries share fields along their border and the crude has similar characteristics. Oil from these deposits can be trucked out to another port and documents forged to hide Iran as the origin.
* Bloomberg
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