Three things I didn’t know about Shimla a week ago. It is the administrative capital of Himachal Pradesh and, although originally “devised for an anticipated peak population of 45,000, at the most 60,000”, its metropolitan area now contains nearly 300,000 people. This is no sleepy remnant of a colonial past but a bustling, busy place. The ridge on which it sits forms a watershed between the Gangetic and Indus river systems. It cleaves the subcontinent in two, one system flowing into the Arabian Sea, and the other into the Bay of Bengal. Despite recent saturation coverage in the British media about the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence, I had managed to miss that it was in Simla, as it was then known, that the key independence negotiations took place. And, appropriately, given the way in which
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