Top 13 Kids-Friendly Weekend Getaways from Delhi. Last Updated: May 13, 2019 / Nidhi Singh. Pratapgarh Farms is an ethnic village resort that provides visitors with warm hospitality, village-like ambience and tons of activities for adults and children alike. A perfect place for a family picnic where each and every member has something.
Contents.History Moser Baer India was founded in New Delhi in 1983 as a Time Recorder unit in technical collaboration with Maruzen Corporation, Japan and Moser Baer Sumiswald, Switzerland. In 1988, it moved into the data storage industry, manufacturing 5.25-inch. 1993, it started manufacturing (MFD).In 1999, it set up a high-capacity plant to manufacture recordable (CD-Rs) and recordable (DVD-Rs). The company is today the only large Indian manufacturer of magnetic and optical media data storage products, exporting around 85 percent of its production.In 2006, the company expanded into the Photovoltaic cells and Home entertainment industries.The company was ordered liquidated due to its bankruptcy on 20 September 2018.
It’s about half an hour to dusk. The goats have been brought back to their pens from where they were tethered to the ground for grazing. The chickens are being rounded up. There are two dogs about — one looking busy, the other looking bored. The masakali are roosting in their kabooter mahal.Looking at me, and possibly reminded of his last visit to Calcutta, the master of the farm asks the cook of the farm if he can make mishti doi from goat’s milk. “Well, we could, but the milk’s so little nowadays,” the cook rues.
Three goats have given birth, so their produce is off-limits.A typical day on a farm. Only, this “Mehrauli goatherd & kabooter baz” as his Twitter bio reads, is also a world-famous historian and award-winning writer.Tuesday, March 28, turned out to be a good day to visit William Dalrymple.“You’ve come on an auspicious occasion,” he says by way of a greeting, his head popping up from behind a wooden gate. I’m sitting by the pool at Mira Singh Farm, a property spread across 4 acres that the Dalrymples call home in India. Located in Mehrauli, off the road connecting Delhi with Gurgaon, it’s actually just a few kilometres from the Qutab Minar but feels like another world.The “auspicious” occasion is the birth of a goat less than an hour before I arrived. William takes me along as he goes to meet the newest member of his farm for the first time. With a black and white coat and beautiful speckled ears, it’s a girl (picture on cover)! We stand and watch as she takes wobbly first steps.
He picks her up and kisses her. I gently pat her little head. William shows me two other kids — one an all-black, the other a stunning white and russet — that have been born in the past week.We go back to the poolside and lug around our cane chairs till we find a patch of shade. It is a blazingly hot day.But it’s a good day to meet William. He has just finished his edits for the UK edition of Kohinoor, his latest book, co-authored with Anita Anand.
He’s happy, he’s relaxed — “I’m all yours,” he says. Golden words for any interviewer.
This simple shed overlooking the pool with a table piled high with books, two lamps and some odds and ends is where all the writing happens! Pictures: Samhita ChakrabortyJEWEL THIEFAs I am about to launch into my questions, two bowls arrive, heaped with bright yellow mangoes cut into perfect little squares. I shake my head sadly. I can’t have them.“You’re allergic?!!! What a terrible affliction!” William exclaims, looking visibly horrified that any human should be thus denied.“Could you take the other bowl to Bruce?” he asks the lady.
That’s William’s “secret weapon”. More on him shortly.We begin talking about the success of Kohinoor. “In two months, it has sold some 20,000 copies and Juggernaut (his publisher) is printing another 10,000,” he says.“Kohinoor came partly as a favour to Chiki Sarkar, who’s an old friend of mine.
I had promised her that when she started Juggernaut, I would do a book for her. And then, well, I had to do it (laughs his famous belly laugh)! One makes these promises rashly. And Chiki is both extremely charming and equally forceful, so I broke from what I was doing for six months to do this book.”What he broke away from is a book on the origins of the East India Company.“That is a much bigger book The Anarchy — that’s the working title. I had thought, frankly, that I could polish this book (Kohinoor) off in six-seven weeks, but I ended up working on it for the better part of a year (laughs)!“The Koh-i-Noor is a major object where even the basic facts seemed to be in dispute.
And then last year there was that famous moment when the Indian solicitor-general (Ranjit Kumar) announced bafflingly that it wasn’t plundered by the British but was given peacefully by Ranjit Singh! Actually, it was given 10 years after Ranjit Singh died. It was handed over as part of a treaty of peace between the East India Company and the Sikhs in 1849.
It was, more or less, plunder of war.“And almost everything in the early part of the Koh-i-Noor’s history turned out to be completely bullshit. There’s not a single solid reference to that stone before 1750, when a Persian historian writes about it for the first time.”. William loves to swim. This is the pool where he rewards himself with a dip when he finishes one page worth of writing.From Dalrymple’s desk 1. In Xanadu (1989): He traces the path taken by Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Shangdu (Xanadu) in China. City of Djinns (1994): His ode to Delhi and the beginning of his literary love affair with India. From the Holy Mountain (1997): A historical travel book on the eastern Christians across Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt.
The Age of Kali (1998): A travel book on the Indian subcontinent. The title refers to the Hindu belief of Kali Yug. White Mughals (2002): On the cultural osmosis between the early Britishers and Muslims in 18th century India, told through the love story of a British officer and a Muslim noblewoman. The Last Mughal (2006): Bahadur Shah Zafar and the collapse of the Mughal empire. Nine Lives (2009): A book on India, told through the lives of nine people from nine religions. 8.Return of a King (2012): The First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842, it throws up surprising parallels with present-day world politics.
9.Kohinoor (2016): The story of the world’s most famous diamond.SECRET WEAPONThe person helping him with the Persian texts is the one who received my bowl of mangoes.“(Translating to English) is always the way to rewrite history in this country, because no one actually reads it! Bruce Wannell is my Persian translator who’s staying here and working on Persian texts for the East India Company book. This is our fifth book together. He’s my secret weapon. He’s a fantastic translator of Persian, he converts very dense Persian manuscripts into witty and clever little English translations. He is Britain’s leading Persian scholar and an old friend.“The Anarchy — there’s a lot of Bengal in it — is about the period after Nadir Shah, when the whole of India disintegrates.
Every village is fighting every other village.and it’s that vacuum that allows the East India Company to rise. In Bengal this period is remembered as the period of the Maratha invasion. You guys have a different view of the Marathas than the one held in Bombay. Quite rightly (smiles). I have been visiting Calcutta and doing research for this book. A lot of this book is set in Calcutta, though it begins and ends in Delhi.
It begins with the defeat of the Mughals by Nadir Shah and the disintegration of the empire and it ends with the capture of Delhi by the British in 1803 in the Battle of Delhi. Between 1739 and 1803, in that 60-year gap a lot of the action takes place in Bengal — Plassey, Murshidabad, Siraj-ud-daula, Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim.”PART-BENGALI!Before we go forward, I want him to look back a little. So, when he was a boy growing up in Scotland, did he ever imagine that one day he would be writing on India and rearing goats in Mehrauli?(Laughs out loud) “No, neither! As a kid I had no interest in India at all, and no awareness of the Indian bits of my past, which I discovered during the writing of White Mughals (his fourth book, 2002). And I’ve got TWO strands of Indian blood! One is Bengali and the other is actually Mughal, bizarrely.”William is “one-32 parts” Bengali, he reckons.
He had during a previous interview (by the Taj Bengal pool in Calcutta that time) told me the tale of how he had managed to trace his Bengali “trickle of blood” to a Hindu Bengali woman of Chandernagore who had converted to Catholicism, taken the name Marie Monica and married a French officer. Guess who is also a descendant of this Bengali lady? Virginia Woolf!And, he’s Mughal too! “One of Itmad ud-Daula’s daughters — the famous one is obviously Noor Jahan — married the Nawab of Machilipatnam or Masulipatnam and one of their granddaughters, Moti Begum, married James Dalrymple in Hyderabad in the 1790s. That marriage is talked about in White Mughals, but I didn’t know when I was writing that the nawabs of Masulipatnam were descendants of Itmad ud-Daula.”KOLKATA, MY ANCESTORS, AND ME: WILLIAM DALRYMPLE’S PHOTO ESSAY FOR. The National Library, once the Governor General’s Lodge.A BIGGER LIFEGoing back to his boyhood, William continues: “I have a piece of paper from an exercise book where I’ve written, to the question what do you want to be when you grow up, that I want to be an author and an archaeologist.
Not too far from the original, eh?“But as a teenager I was more keen on archaeology. I loved the idea of going on digs. I spent all my summer holidays on digs in Scotland and England.
I had originally planned to go to Iraq to dig there. I started off by being fascinated by ancient Egypt, moved to ancient Middle East, but then Saddam Hussein closed the British School of Archaeology and I ended up coming to India for a year.
I arrived on January 26, 1984.“I travelled around, fell in love with the country, really. I went to Cambridge and wrote In Xanadu immediately after, worked for The Independent for a few months. And got them to appoint me their India correspondent and by September 1989, I was placed here and I’ve pretty much been here ever since.“It’s home now. I’ve stopped asking myself the question, why India.
This is where I live, this is what I do. I just love it here. What’s not to like? If I was in England or Scotland, it’d be muddy walks up muddy drives, doing the shopping at Sainsbury’s.
Here you can live a bigger life.”FARM FRESH“I grew up in the country, so I’m used to country living. But by nature I’m quite sociable, really. I’d probably go bonkers if I lived up in Mussoorie or in Goa. So this works very well.
My bit of Jaipur (Literature Festival, where he is a founding director) is run from here. Teamwork Arts (the company that organises JLF) is just round the corner, then there’s this whole life of literary Delhi, with book launches every night if you want to (go).
But equally you can just lock yourself away here and lose yourself in the 18th century (smiles), which I spend quite a lot of my life doing.“Living on a farm like this, living off the land, having your own vegetables, having your own goats’ milk. You get a lot more done, frankly. I think I am much more prolific than most of my contemporaries because I think I am able to devote more of my life to my work. As opposed to going to do the shopping, picking up kids from school.
Indian middle-class life allows you to send the driver to do one, the cook to do the other. And that means you can get a lot more done, frankly!“A lot of my contemporaries lost decades to school runs, particularly the women, who are always getting dumped with that., and this life on a farm, where you are growing most of your own stuff, and everything is on hand, is very conducive to productivity.“We have parsnips now, and aubergines, chillies, onions. In the peak season we grow everything! Mountains of broccoli, cauliflower, pak choi, mustard, different kinds of salad leaves, mizuna, rockets, leeks, potatoes. It’s a proper working farm. And it’s lovely eating stuff fresh out of the ground.”. Named by the Dalrymple children, there are two dogs on the farm — Fudge, the brown one, and Aishwarya, the black and white one.
‘Aishwarya’s a grumpy old lady,’ William says. ‘She’s taken a liking to you, otherwise she’d be barking her head off.’GILBERT THE GOAT“I’ve always liked goats and my wife (Olivia Fraser, the artist) gave me a mother, Georgina, and a baby son, Gilbert. The mother died this year, Gilbert is now this huge beast, the size of a Shetland pony (laughs).
What we didn’t realise is that goats are the most incestuous beasts in the world! So within a few months, Gilbert had gotten his mother pregnant (laughing hard now). Everything else just followed from that. We do bring in new blood occasionally.“Unlike most farms, this is a proper working farm. I mean, in Delhi, farms are normally suburban villas but we do actually grow our own food and farm things.
We make the milk into labneh, goat’s cheese. When we make a lot, we give it to our friends. We should try and make mishti doi maybe (grins).“We have snakes in monsoon, and peacocks this time of the year — they make such a racket on hot nights.
We have teetar. It is quite rural around here.”It certainly is a life far removed from the life of adventure he had embarked upon as a young journalist. “When you are 21, you are meant to be shot at,” he had once said in an interview.
I remind him of that and he chuckles. But his courtship with danger changed one day, suddenly.“Certainly I loved being a sort of amateur war correspondent. I never really did the super dangerous stuff, I never actually covered shooting wars, I would hover around the edges when the Tamil Tigers were leaving Sri Lanka, or covered the early insurgencies and militancy in Kashmir in 1989-90. The Intifada, the Jamaat-e-Islami uprising in Egypt, the PKK insurgency in Turkey, quite a lot of stuff on the Taliban in Afghanistan. But I lost, overnight, my urge to do that when my daughter Ibby, my first child, was born. That’s when the history books started. And I started going to the British Library instead (laughs).A LOVE STORY THAT MADE ‘HISTORY’“I came across the story (of British officer James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Muslim noblewoman Khair un-Nissa) for the first time when I went to Hyderabad.
I wrote about it in an essay called Under the Char Minar, which is in my book The Age of Kali. So, initially it was just a 7,000-word long-form essay. And then I found out that old Kirkpatrick’s papers had recently been bought and catalogued by the British Library, and by pure chance they were put on the stacks fully catalogued exactly at the time that I was beginning working on what became White Mughals, which at that point wasn’t about Kirkpatrick, it was about the Brits in general who embraced Indian culture. It was an incredible stroke of luck. Here was stuff which no one else had used.“This was 1995. We had left Delhi and moved back to London.
My daughter had just been born. I found myself plunging into this world. I mean up until then I had been a war correspondent and travel writer, running around Ibby’s now 22, and I’m now 52, so I must have been about 30 It was a good moment to embrace a totally different lifestyle a sort of transition into early middle age.“Before that for five-six years I was doing exciting young man stuff.
Now I was living in London, being a father and going on the Tube each day to the British Library, working all day and then coming back in the evening to face an angry wife (laughs).“We had some eight years in London, which coincided with all three of our children (Ibby, Sam and Adam) being born, but we brought them back to India, Ibby aged eight, Adam aged two, and put them in British school. They’ve spent either half or all of their childhood here, and like me and Olive (Olivia) they go backwards and forwards between the two worlds.“Olivia, Ibby and Adam are in London at the moment and will be back here in a couple of days. And Sam is driving through the Punjab having spent a week up in Dharamsala looking at Tibetan manuscripts. He’s studying Sanskrit at Oxford.”Not just the books, there’s a lot more that keeps him busy the 10 months of the year that William is in India.
“There’s Jaipur (JLF), which is developing into quite a full-time job. And my photography, I suppose. That also is coming to occupy more and more of my time. Last year I had an exhibition (which was compiled into the book The Writer’s Eye, by Harper Collins India), there’s one this year, on Delhi, and there’s one on Calcutta! I published my photographs on the BBC website.It’s an essay on my family. It talks about my wicked Bengali ancestor, James Pattle, who was so wicked that the Devil wouldn’t let him leave India and he blew up in the middle of the Hooghly, having been pickled in rum.
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His plaque is on the walls of St. John’s Church in Calcutta. Weirdly, it’s next to the plaque of Kirkpatrick, the hero of White Mughals, who’s buried in the Park Street cemetery.”KANDAHAR TO WHITE HOUSEHe may have left his adventurous war journalism days behind him but adventure clearly hasn’t left him. When he was gathering material for his last book but one, The Return of a King, his car was shot at in Kandahar in Afghanistan.Thankfully it was an armoured vehicle, so he wasn’t hurt.“Returning to Afghanistan for Return of a King, it was an adrenaline shot after a period of sleep,” he grins when I mention the incident. “Very exciting.
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But this time I wasn’t a war correspondent, I was just trying to gather manuscripts, but ended up getting shot at. I had more danger, actually, gathering manuscripts for Return of a King than I ever did as a war correspondent!
I never actually got a bullet in my car as a war correspondent but I got one as a historian! And you’d think it was all sedentary as a historian!”Being a historian has had some more exciting fallouts too. Like being called to the White House!“There was a series of very nice serendipities. I have a friend who is the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, Saad Mohseni, and he was a fan of Return of a King, and he gave it to (Afghanistan President Hamid) Karzai. Karzai read it and got very excited about it and called me to Kabul, to brief him on the history and took the lesson from it that he should basically publicly distance himself from the Americans, to make sure that he’s never perceived as a puppet.
And then there was a flurry of diplomatic cables because the Americans got worried that he was distancing himself. The two results of that were, one, I became a part of WikiLeaks, because Hillary Clinton’s letter about Karzai reading Return of a King appeared on the front page of The New York Times (laughs), bizarrely! And then I got called to the White House, to talk, not to Obama sadly, but to his staff.
So, I talked to the Afghan desk there. They’re incredibly bright and clever but they didn’t know their history.
So all this was news to them.”I mention the word “Trump” and he starts laughing. “I don’t see any other invitations coming,” he quips.The shadows of the frangipani tree near me are lengthening.
I want to lengthen my time in this wonderland too. But there’s a farm to be tended. Books to be written. A bigger life to be led. I bid goodbye.— Samhita Chakraborty.