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Concept
Jack Bertoli
Summary
Jack Vicajee Bertoli (born October 1931 in Mumbai, India), is an Indian planner and architect, naturalised as a Swiss citizen, and living in Geneva, Switzerland, and Spain. He was born to an Italian father, Fausto Piscionieri, an interior designer and architect practising in India in the early 1930s, and a Parsee (Zoroastrian) mother, Kathleen "Kitty" Vicajee. His mother's family, the Vicajees, are one of the oldest Zoroastrian Parsee families, who were closely attached as bankers to Nizam of Hyderabad, one of the wealthiest Muslim rulers of India. A silver coin, the "Pestonshahi Sikka", was minted in India in 1840 for the first and only time, in honour of the Pestonjee Meherjee brothers, for the Vicajee family.
When Jack Bertoli was a child his mother divorced his father and went to live with her sister, Thelma "Vicajee" Tata, and her husband J.R.D. Tata, a prominent industrialist, visionary, philanthropist, and planner who obtained a Bharat Ratna, the highest civil award in India.
Kitty became a voluntary nurse during the second World War for the wounded army and navy men, and later remarried an Italian Naval Officer, Giovanni Bertoli, one of the first pilots in the Italian Navy before Aircraft carriers, with catapulted planes. He was shot down by the RAF in the African Campaign near Tripoly in 1942, taken prisoner, and put in charge of the Italian Prisoner of War Camps in India. His knowledge and enthusiasm for aircraft led to a close friendship with J.R.D. Tata, who was the first Indian ever to obtain a flying licence, Indian Licence Number 1., on 10 February 1929. In 1930, he participated in the Aga Khan Prize to be the first Indian to attempt to fly solo from England to India. In 1932, he flew the first air link for the Indian Airmail service from Karachi to Bombay in a DeHavilland Gypsy-Moth, and established Tata Airlines, which later became Air-India. After the war, Giovanni Bertoli retired from the Italian Navy with the rank of Rear-Admiral and joined Air-India as the District Manager for Continental Europe, based in Geneva, Switzerland.
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