Word: simla
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Iron Tubs & Partnership. Thirty-five years ago Mohan Oberoi landed his first job as $5.50-a-week desk clerk in Simla's Cecil Hotel, part of the British-owned Associated Hotels Ltd. At the time, India's inns had no room service, no running water. Guests bathed in galvanized iron tubs and brought their own servants, who bedded down in the hotel halls. Oberoi learned fast; by 1927 he was chief clerk at Simla's Clarke's Hotel, and a few years later bought a one-third partnership for $2,000 down, $6,000 later...
...Prime Minister Nehru warned Parliament of "a creeping in of violence in our public activities. How do we produce the atmosphere that results in this?" He had hardly finished speaking when violence broke out again, this time in the pleasant little town of Kalka, among the mountain foothills of Simla. There, police, frightened and outnumbered by an attacking mob of 1,500 people armed with stones and bottles, fired point-blank into the crowd. The toll: five dead, a score critically injured...
...Simla he gave $400 for one cup of tea, and when his car flattened a farmer's chicken on the road, the owner received $40 in kingly recompense. At Benares, after getting an honorary degree, His Majesty donated $10,000 to a university students' union; at Aligarh he gave $600 to his car drivers. During a few days in New Delhi, his party spent $100,000 in gift shops for gold-threaded cloth, sandalwood and ivory bric-a-brac for the wives back home...
Moreover, China never ratified the 1913 Simla Convention, which roughly established the Himalayan mountain range as the Tibetan frontier and awarded "the southern watershed" to India and the border states. Red China's new school maps show much of India's borderland as Chinese territory...
Through the years, even the name went through strange evolutions. Simla Vulpina (fox-monkey), after Martyr's description, turned out to be the Boschrot of Dutch explorers, the rat de bois of Louisiana's French trappers, didelphys in the classic zoology of Linnaeus and finally the modern opossum. This is the Indian name as recorded by Captain John Smith at Jamestown. But even Smith was wrong, said the King's surveyor in Carolina. The word was possum, preceded by a grunt, hence the opossum...