The Portfolio Book of Great Indian Business Stories by Penguin Books India

Author:Penguin Books India
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789352140213
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

It might be recalled that the Hon. Miss Eden arrived in Simla sixty years before the mountain railway did. Not that its lack deterred the well-heeled gentry who made the annual trip every summer. Today, you can fly into the hill station, but there is no guarantee that the experience of travelling in a Vayudoot Dornier in a high wind will not be akin to a ride in a ‘dhoolie’ (doli) which was described as ‘sitting in a half-reefed top-sail in a storm’. This canvas and bamboo litter was the main mode of travel for those who could not do it astride a stomping chestnut mare.

Once up, however, it was little short of paradise for the ‘heaven born service’, and minor functionaries. Lord Curzon may have bought the Retreat in nearby Mashobra to escape the ‘despotism of the despatch boxes’, but, by all accounts, an officer had difficulty remaining a gentleman in that rarefied atmosphere.

It was very early in its imperial existence that Simla acquired the reputation of being the haunt of flirt, philanderer and fortune-hunter, of match-maker and maiden-chaser, and, by Gad! the cad. It was only a killjoy like Honoria Lawrence who primly pursed her lips and dismissed Simla society as ‘a bundle of tinsel, rags and dirt’, its conversation the ‘contents of a dustpan, a many-sided buzz of scandal, and vanity, hasty censure, mutilated praise and insincere profession’.

While the Punjab Government also moved up to Simla and the Indian Army was headquartered there, it was the annual migration of the Government of India that gave Simla its airs. There is, of course, sufficient record of affairs of the State and serious decision-making, not all of it as florid as George Abereigh-Mackay’s in Twenty-one Days in India:

How mysterious and delicious are the cool penetralia of the Viceregal office. It is the sensorium of the Empire, it is the seat of thought; it is the abode of moral responsibility! What famines, what battles, what excursions of pleasure, what banquets and pageants, what concepts of change have sprung into life here? Every pigeon-hole contains a potential revolution, every office box cradles the embryo of a war or death. What shocks and vibrations, what deadly thrills does this little thunder-cloud office transmit to far away provinces lying beyond rising and setting suns.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.