Yet the dawn of online shopping is changing the lives of people in rural areas — and is breathing new life into India Post, the ailing state-run postal network, which has struggled with a huge deficit for years. It has been a huge success, with parcel deliveries increasing 15-fold to 75,000 daily deliveries in the past two years.Postal workers use bicycles and old cloth mail bags which make it difficult to transport bigger or multiple parcels.Part of the firms’ success has been driven by giving customers the chance to pay cash on delivery — although it takes up to two days to find out if a parcel was accepted by a distant recipient. "We have already purchased it from a nearby town.

Many rural Indians are still new to the Internet — up to a billion people are not yet online in the country — and are wary of e-commerce sites, preferring to hand over money only after receiving the goods."These companies give us a variety we don’t get in our local markets, quality at competitive rates and a doorstep delivery" said Yadav, as he accepted a delivery of a spray paint machine. Take it back," she said."Now we are delivering women&coating resin Suppliers039;s clothes and latest electronic gadgets even in the remote regions of country like Leh and Ladakh," she added.It also plans to address the issue of tracking deliveries, including by giving handheld devices to postal workers. While in the United States online giant Amazon and its ilk experiment with futuristic # drones and one-hour deliveries, in rural India e-commerce retains a distinctly old-fashioned feel. The value of cash-on-delivery parcels handled by the postal department is expected to register a 300 per cent increase by the end of financial 2015 compared with last year, India Post said. Government clerk Surinder Singh Yadav from rural Ula Hedi village in Neemrana district says the dawn of e-commerce has transformed shopping for his family, who now nudge him to order products they see advertised on television.. One such customer is Sudesh Yadav, a farmer's wife in Daulat Singh Pura village in Neemrana who refused to accept her parcel of a car cleaning kit."It has given a sense of empowerment to customers who are not confident about e-commerce shopping," said K.In the past two years the 160-year-old postal giant has tied up with 400 e-commerce companies including Amazon and Indian giant Flipkart to deliver a diverse range of goods.The department has upgraded or added around 70 modern parcel handling centres with existing post offices in the last two years and plans to add to its standing fleet of around 900 mail vans across India.Financial woesIndia Post, founded under colonial rule in 1854, hopes the huge growth of e-commerce will enable it to reverse its ailing financial situation.It hopes to slash its 0 million average annual deficit and improve profitability at its 140,000 rural post offices. He pedals miles each day in rural Rajasthan state, ferrying packages to villages and takes payments in cash because most of his customers do not have bank accounts, let alone credit cards."

These parcel deliveries in the last couple of years are once again making us busier," اين نام مجاز نمي باشدn Lal, a postman with Neemrana post office said."Until recently, people in these rural areas had aspirations but no means to access the market," Kav-ery Banerjee, secretary of India Post, told AFP. But India’s vast areas of rural terrain, where roads can be poor and infrastructure patchy, pose challenges to the digital revolution.Villagers in India opting for services provided by online retailers to get goods deliveredWith his rickety bicycle and sackcloth mail bag, 62-year-old Indian postman Chet Ram does not look like a worker at the vanguard of an e-commerce revolution delivering everything from mobile phones to cow manure. Most small post offices, like the one in Neemrana, depend on unreliable public transport to collect parcels from region's bigger post offices.Online commerceThe absence of reliable private delivery companies outside the big cities led India Post to step in to fill the gap.Communication and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters last month that the Indian postal department had the potential to become the "world's leading e-commerce delivery platform"."The company has sent the order almost a week late," she told the postman who had cycled to her home on a cold January morning to deliver the goods.It deploys its vast network of about 460,000 employees across 155,000 post offices to take goods to customers in remote areas, often hundreds of kilometres (miles) from the nearest town.C Verma, an assistant superintendent at a post office in Behror, a town close to Neemrana. For rural India's postmen, the flood of parcel deliveries recalls the days of the 1980s or 1990s when sending letters and postcards was much more common.

""They said he wasn’t a martyr, but a terrorist," Mahameed said. "Their tragedy is like our tragedy. "We are martyrs, and they are martyrs," she said. Motherhood slowed her career, but the war brought it to a halt.Mahameed, left with three children, hopes the portraits will warm the hearts of the victims’ families, though she hasn’t figured out how to deliver the drawings. She is working in her Amman apartment, where the walls are covered with canvases of beauty and disaster: elks in a golden forest; a frowning clown with a handful of balloons; children behind barbed wire, screaming next to splattered blood; a man clutching a stomach wound; a half-finished painting of Damascus’ Umayyad Mosque, symbolic of home and the cultural heritage she, too, fears is targeted by extremism sweeping the world.Mahameed is now filling in the portraits’ colors.

Troops poured gasoline in their rooms and set fire to the building. The Mahameeds decided to flee Syria when government soldiers entered their lodging and saw a picture of Yasser with the label of "martyr. She believes it can chase away some of the dark images she says have infected the psyches of Syrian children, including that of Usama — whose notebooks are filled with war scenes.The 41-year old artist is now drawing portraits of some of the 130 people killed in the Nov..On April 24, 2012, Syrian government tanks shells blew up part of the family home in the southern town of Deraa, cradle of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad that quickly turned into a civil war.

When asked, she brings a portrait of Yasser from the back room. She sold paintings in Syria and the United Arab Emirates before marriage."Mahameed was encouraged to paint by her father, an architect, and she had her first exhibition at age 14.After the death of Yasser, the family spent a year on the move, trying to evade street battles."I felt what every mother feels when she loses someone to such a criminal act," Mahameed said, gesturing with a wine-colored pencil. "Innocent people don’t have anything to do with politics or other countries."We must heal psychologically, and draw out these dark ideas from inside them," Mahameed said. When the family fled across the street, a sniper killed Yasser."When these French people died in Paris, I felt their pain," she said in her living room in the Jordanian capital of Amman, wearing a speckled headscarf.Mahameed said they fell victim to the same fanaticism that killed her 16-year-old son Yasser at the beginning of Syria’s civil war. Government forces kept the body for 15 days before the family could bury him. She flew to Amman in August 2013, along with 16-year-old daughter Ronza and sons Usama, 9, and Rayan, 6.Mahameed hopes to leave Jordan soon because she is unable to work legally.Through the tragedies, her art has remained.The family left for Egypt where they lived for eight months before Mahameed decided to split from her husband. 13 attacks in the French capital, for which the extremist Islamic State group claimed responsibility."Mahameed found photos of the victims on the Internet, and used print-outs for pencil sketches of their faces: a young blonde girl seated before a meal, a bespectacled man in a green jacket smiling calmly, a dozen people staring straight at the camera.Lina Mahameed, a Syrian artist and refugee from Daraa, holds a colour portrait she drew of one of the people killed in Construction fireproof coating the November 13 attacks in Paris — AP When Syrian war refugee Lina Mahameed saw TV reports of the recent Paris attacks, she recognised her own story reflected in the brutality.

Not only did we shout at each other a lot, the greatest discovery was that the silent people were the most useful!".The results were hilarious and we all left really relaxed. We get many corporate teams of freshers who are awkward around each other coming in, and with one experience in a closed room, they transform into a team. We take a look at the crazy new trends in team games that Bengalureans have been getting up to, to boost their squad’s energy levels."Corporates are not the only ones. Shruti N, a creative designer who recently got married to her Australian husband, Scott, says, "In the days leading to my wedding, my husband’s sisters and friends were always awkward around my family. It was a huge success because for the first time, people had a chance to work together in a really fun setting, in spite of the language barriers. Aniruddh Bhaskar, a marketing analyst with a city firm, discovered the tough life with an office game that required him to make a tent in the wilderness." Some team games, however, force you to leave your shell for mere survival. "We first had to build a raft, then take it to the other side of a stream, where a tent had to be assembled – all this in the outs******ts of a city like Bengaluru. The idea is to not involve any sort of machinery so that people can study the others in their team and work out a way of escape that suits them all, instead of staring at a screen like they do at work anyway. Overtime, we realised that in spite of the cricket matches, colleagues were still cloistered in their own twosome groups and not getting to know the team at all, so we decided to organise a scavenger hunt at a large mall. Avantika Ghosh, who works as the chief of human resources at an IT firm in the city, says, "We have several teams made up of people, all who come from every where in India. With cross-cultural weddings taking place in larger numbers in the city, brides and grooms to be have been taking their friends and families out for activities that can boost understanding better than a stiff lunch in a star hotel.

With a dozen city venues opening up for detailed day adventures, team games have slowly been moving away from the physical. They were practically snowed in by worries that a freak remark will offend us. So my husband and I decided to take our respective friends and families out for a day of paint-balling and go-karting.From brides who need their bridesmaids to know each other well on the lead up to the big day, to corporate offices which coating resin manufacturers need their young teams comprising fresh graduates from all over the country to gel, activities that foster team spirit have taken a radical few steps up in this city. ******an Shivappa, who runs the Escape Room, says, "We create a story of a prison where the ‘inmates’ have 45 minutes to escape with nothing but the combined power of their minds."One of the newest trends is to eschew technology altogether and have a fun day out with your team.