… is a beautiful place!
Having walked through the reception area, Alfresco, Legacy Lounge and Tea Lounge, it was time for us to move towards the rooms in the different blocks. In the Edwardian block, built between 1901 and 1910 to commemorate the reign of King Edward in England, on some windowsill or corner, as in every other part of […]
Read More Ending at the start…Having read and written so much on the once Auckland, once Wilson’s and finally “Great Eastern Hotel” as we knew it till the time that it closed shop, I had been craving to go for that Heritage Walk through the huge structure standing regally across the Governor House, on the Old Court house street since […]
Read More A walk through the annals of history…Remember our young friend Billy (God bless his soul), who unfortunately perished to a bad bout of dysentery on landing in Kolkata in the early 1900s? The one whose letters from his betrothed Rose lay undelivered for centuries at the Dead Letter Post Office standing right in the heart of Dalhousie Square, Calcutta? While the […]
Read More To Wilson’s, or to Spence’s Hall…“A man could walk in at one end, buy a complete outfit, a wedding present, or seeds for the garden, have an excellent meal, a burra peg (double) and if the barmaid was agreeable, walkout at the other end engaged to be married”. (City of Dreadful Night by Rudyard Kipling) There was a famous saying […]
Read More The “Great” Eastern witness to the life of a city“Contiguous to the Esplanade is the Government House, a superb edifice, approached by four colossal gates emblazoned with the Britannic Arms.” – Thomas & William Daniell, British painters, 1810. Before we get into more intricate details of Raj Bhawan, there is one little thing, well technically about 100 tonnes (or a little more) heavy, that […]
Read More Stories around the Government House Part II“The Government House is, without doubt, the finest Government House occupied by the representative of any Sovereign or Government in the world.” – George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of British India on Government House, Calcutta Imagine living in a palace and ruling from it a century after it was built designed on the lines of the […]
Read More Stories around the Government House Part I“On the 7th of August, 1905, the leaders of Bengal, in public meeting assembled…under the presidency of Maharaja Mannidra Chandra Nundy of Cossimbazar, an eminent landlord of Bengal had already declared “ a general boycott of British goods as a practical protest against the proposed partition.” – Excerpts from Chapter 4, Young India by Lala […]
Read More Home to Kolkata Panorama and much more…“Seven generations of my family were born in Calcutta, there are three Dalrymples sitting inside St John’s graveyard. And a great-great-grandfather’s plaque is on the St John’s Church wall.” – William Dalrymple While the graves might have been shifted to a different location with St. John’s Church compound no longer being a graveyard, the plaques, […]
Read More Wrapping up the St. John’s Church visitThe St. John’s Church is indeed one of a kind. While I gave glimpses of the remarkable church compound in my last post, in this one, we will slowly step in through the foyer and take in the first set of unimaginably amazing artefacts that you might have no idea could exist anymore! Consecrated on […]
Read More St. John’s Church Interiors – Unimaginably historical“We owe to future generations a preserved and unmutilated heritage of Calcutta’s eccentric but exciting old buildings,” – Amartya Sen Having covered most of the Tank Square, as it was called in its heydays, the distant steeple of the St. John’s Church calls…like an appropriate next stop, particularly having mentioned the Black Hole tragedy in […]
Read More “Presidency” Church compounds – A walk through history