By Ganesh Saili
To Raja Ram Srivastava goes the credit for starting nightlife in these hills. And pray, who was he? He was the first and last Indian Manager of the famed Charleville Hotel, then owned by a mysterious Mr Fonseca, who also owned Delhi’s Taj Mansingh. Not wanting his guests to stray into other establishments seeking entertainment, he had the brilliant idea of holding the first of our beauty pageants.
The more I look at it, the more credit is owed to Raja Ram for finding, among his guests, the nubile Nutan, a fourteen-year-old, who became the first Miss Mussoorie. Little did she know at the time how many beauty contests would trace the living imprint of her feet, or the fame she would find on becoming an actress in Bollywood.
What began at the Charleville was quickly followed up at the Savoy Hotel and Hakman’s Grand Hotel. It snowballed to Whispering Windows when Bridgette Aurora, a local girl, was crowned Miss Teenage Mussoorie. On the sidelines, there was always GL Madhok, with jokes and witty songs. And, of course, the magician Gogia Pasha could be found chanting ‘Gilly! Gilly!’
Hotel.
Pic courtesy: Sriniwas Kathikala.
In the 1990s, it all came to a tragic end. I heard the owner of Whispering Windows, DP Singh, complaining bitterly: ‘Those louts – they trashed my hotel!’
He was most hurt that it was the locals to blame. They had ripped out the low-slung lights over the tables. Elsewhere, on the steps of the grand ballroom lay littered flower pots registering their protest at not being granted free admission. A repeat of this performance was seen at other places: at Hackman’s Grand Hotel, those lovely beechwood chairs with backs of steam-bent wood, brought from England a hundred years ago, lay in a smouldering pile.
Despite noble intentions, today’s Autumn Festivals or Winter Carnivals do not stand a chance of bringing back the old glory that was once the hallmark of nights in the hill stations of India.
Commisioner in London.
Pic courtesy: the Internet.
Until the 1970s, Rudy Cotton played the saxophone at the Savoy, while Pat Blake and his dozen boys held live music shows at Hackman’s Grand Hotel. Meanwhile, the famous Thunderbird, Ashwani Kumar, would croon on the first floor at the Whispering Windows in the Library Bazaar area.
‘You could say the Queen of Hills became the Hill of Queens!’ Narendra Sahani, an old-time resident, remembers wistfully.
My old friend, the late Nandu Jauhar, would say: ‘They were all the same thing, call them Miss Mussoorie or Summer Queen, May Queen or June Queen, or Autumn Queen. If you had thrown in a few twigs, you could have had a Jungle Queen!”
Of course, everything was fixed! A local official’s wife, despite her pear-shaped figure of 32-40-50, was to be the winner! Sitting back one summer’s midnight at the Bush Television Queen (probably the last of our beauty contests), as the drumbeats reached a crescendo, the lights dimmed, revealing Luscious Lola, a cabaret artist from Calcutta, who, no longer the stuff of dreams and well past her prime, flopped around the ballroom. She draped her stole around a balding guest, the drums stopped, and the solitary stags pretending to dance in the rear of the ballroom stopped dancing. The judges, in their combined wisdom, had reached a decision.
But all the murmurs were drowned as the front door quivered as rampaging hoodlums shouting: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ bullied the guards into giving them free entry. Of course, those who had paid protested, only to be roughed up. Lamentably, the vandalism went unchecked, and it extinguished our nightlife forever.
Postscript: On my desk, I find a clipping sent by a nephew of mine. Sanjay Bahuguna is most generous as usual. It’s from the Auckland Herald of May 2013: ‘Do you know who I am?’ That’s all it took, Aaron Gilmore, Member of Parliament, in New Zealand, to confess he was a “boor”, a “bully” and a “d#?#head” for threatening to have a barman sacked by the PMO for not serving him an extra drink.
“I don’t really think New Zealanders give a toss about him!” said John Key, the Prime Minister, accepting the resignation.
(Ganesh Saili, born and homegrown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found renown worldwide.)
