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Marrying off 7 sisters and initiating the careers of 3 brothers is itself a project, which one man would find hard-pressed to complete. Add to this the task of running a business to fuel these projects, and one gets an idea of the hard task that H.P.Sivananda, now Managing Director of Vikram Travels Resorts India, had been doing for the past 25 years.

With the money obtained from selling gold chain, and with one employee, he had started a tourist firm in a small room under the staircase of a building at Mangalore.  And his main aim was to earn enough profit to look after his siblings.  The very first tour of the company was a bus trip to North India in 1981 with 14 tourists.  Now the company, which owns many luxury buses and employs 150 permanent staff, run 60 tour packages of 4 to 18 days duration to different parts of India.

Sivananda remembers the deprivation of his school days when he possessed just one pair of dress.  So after washing, he was forced to wear the wet cloths.  Even while at school, he had worked together with his brothers and sisters to produce and sell vegetables in the neighbourhood.  After SSLC, he underwent a brief struggle at Chennai before coming back to Kanhangad and subsequently starting his own firm.

In all their tours, 2 guides are present and the charges include boarding and lodging.  Even though it isn’t profitable, the company runs a tourist bus trip from Kanhangad to Kottanchery Hills every day in order to encourage tourism.

Sivananda had plunged into business after realizing that a salaried job wouldn’t solve his problem of finding a future for 10 members of the family.  Perhaps, in the endeavour to complete this project he has remained a bachelor.

Courtesy: K.Vinod Chandran, Mathrubhumi, August 21, 2006
Contributed by: Administrator

"A diamond is valuable though it lies on a dung hill."