mangosteen...
Marine insurance is all about
providing insurance coverage for ‘goods in transit’ …. While cargo – Marine Insurance, offers so much of variety and interest … more
interesting is the coverage of ‘fruits’ in transit…. These are primarily goods
perishable in nature – that may be spoilt when not handled properly. Harvesting at the correct time is essential to
the production of quality fruits – be it apples, oranges, bananas, mangoes
……………. To ensure maximum storage life, they
should be harvested when mature but not
yet fully ripe or overripe. If harvested before they have matured, the fruits will not taste good and can be susceptible to
storage disorders. Ripe fruit should be avoided because it will continue to
ripen in storage, rapidly becoming too soft and mealy for sale. Firmness and
the level of soluble solids are good indicators of maturity to use in
determining picking time.
Quality consists of a combination of
visual appearance, texture and flavor. People buy fruits by their appearance too and
hence one should avoid bruising and other external damages to the cargo. Damage
from rough handling will accelerate deterioration, reducing the value of the
product. Many a times, fruit sellers adopt many processes including : post-ripening
of green or unsatisfactorily colored fruits; removal of dirt, sooty mold,
spraying residues and scale insects in washers; coating them with a layer of
wax and treatment with preservatives ~ and then grade them according to colour,
texture, size, class, variety and more…. offering insurance coverage for such
products can be quite enthralling and challenging when it comes to providing
appropriate insuring terms and conditions.
In the sweltering summer, the
very thought of Courtallam would make one feel pleasant. The place dedicated Lord Thirukutralanathar
has great waterfalls with every season attracting thousands of people, bathing
and enjoying themselves to good health in the herbal waters. The mountain abounds with forests of precious
trees like teak and exotic fruit plants like Mangustan which are not only sweet
but also of great medicinal value.
Till a few decades ago, some of the
fruits were available only there … gone are those days – now you get everything
in your local markets – thanks to the developed marketing, transportation and
more … not so, when it comes to insurance……. One such local flavor is ‘mangusthan’ ….. The purple mangosteen (Garcinia
mangostana), colloquially known simply as mangosteen, is a tropical
evergreen tree believed to have originated in the Sunda
Islands and the Moluccas of Indonesia. It grows mainly in
Southeast Asia, and also in tropical South American countries such as Colombia, in the state of Kerala in India and in Puerto Rico,where
the tree has been introduced. The tree grows from 6 to 25 m (19.7 to 82.0 ft)
tall. The fruit of the mangosteen is sweet and tangy, juicy, and somewhat
fibrous, with an inedible, deep reddish-purple colored rind (exocarp) when
ripe.
Now read this report in Daily Mail….. Malaysia’s
police chief confirmed that detectives probing the disappearance of flight
MH370 have been to a farm to interview everyone who handled a cargo of
mangosteens, an exotic fruit. Supporting an exclusive report in the Daily Mail
last month which raised the question of whether an explosive device could have
been planted in the cargo of four tons of mangosteens, Inspector-General Tan
Sir Khalid Abu Bakar said the cargo was under investigation.
Revealing that police ‘have clues’ to the
disappearance of the aircraft - without saying what they were - he did reveal
that one aspect of the widespread investigation involved the purple-coloured
fruit, about the size of a tangerine. It is reported that Investigators are looking into who
ordered them, paid for them and plucked and packed them from an orchard in Muar
(a town 93 miles south east of Kuala
Lumpur). Inspector-General Bakar said that he did not
discount the possibility that the cause of the aircraft’s disappearance might
never be known.
Speaking at a police college in Kuala
Lumpur Inspector-General Bakar said the
Chief Pilot’s flight simulator had not been ‘cleared’, despite official
comments last week stating that it had been, reported the Sun Daily of Malaysia
~ and despite other claims that all passengers and crew had been cleared of
suspicion, Inspector-General Bakar said that while the 227 passengers had been
vindicated, the jet’s crew members were still under investigation. On the list
of investigations involving police, he confirmed, four possibilities remained -
hijacking, sabotage, the psychological state of all crew members and their
personal issues.
His comments and the continuing four
areas of investigation suggested that the police were still considering a human
element in the fate of the Boeing 777, which was carrying 239 passengers and
crew on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it vanished
on March 8. In a shock comment, he denied that pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s
home-based flight simulator, which his own Minister of Defence, Hishimmuddin
Hussein, had declared to be free of suspicion, had in fact been cleared. The
simulator, which had been removed from Zaharie’s home by police, following
which the hard drive had been sent to FBI technical experts, had come under suspicion
because all data before early February had been wiped from it by the Captain.
The VVIP on board in that
ill-fated plane mentioned in first para was - Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the sixth
President of Pakistan from 1978 until his death in 1988. There have been reports (though not
authentic, especially within Pak) that the crash was a political assassination
carried out by some foreign agencies. One theory had it that the Intelligence of a top Nation had spiked mangos with VX gas to eliminate Zia
because of his unreliable commitment to a more democratic government and his
loyalty to Afghan mujahideen. A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) is a comic
novel by the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif based on the plane crash that
killed General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, former president of Pakistan. The
book has a dark satirical style.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
3rd April 2014.
