My Heritage walk

                                                               COLABA
Today,I went on a heritage walk in Colaba and Fort.It started off at the Gateway of India. Earlier the gateway was a pagoda like thing , which they turned into a Taj Mahal in 1911 to welcome King George V and Queen Mary which was made out of P O P.Then to commemorate the occasion where Delhi became capital they built the Gateway. Then after talking about the salute battery on middle ground island,we proceeded to the Taj Mahal hotel built in 1903. Did you know that the Taj Mahal hotel is built the wrong way round.. Yes it is! The earlier builder had gone for a holiday leaving the plans to his workers. When he came back he noticed that it was built backwards. Poor chap,he thought he was finished ,he jumped off the dome. Little did he know that he had built one of the best hotels in Mumbai. Anyway, moving on we saw the old premises of the Royal Bombay yacht club meant only for white sahibs, now owned by the atomic energy commission of India. The current premises of the club is the RBYC chambers.Then we saw the Majestic Hotel which is now Sahakari Bhandar and  an MLA hostel.
                                                              FORT
We proceeded to Fort. Fort is named after the Bombay Fort(very creative.....).When the walls of the fort were brought down there was a lot of land and some of it was sold off.One such plot went to the haberdasher(person who sells hats,silk and satin) James Watson.He wanted to build the swankiest hotel in town.He started construction of the Watson Hotel in 1867 when the Suez canal had opened. Construction completed in 1870.It is one of the largest cast iron buildings in India. The first motion picture in India was shown here.It has 4 floors where the lift casting is different on each floor. The atrium is beautiful but it stinks and is very dirty.It took all my will power to go in but it was beautiful. The David Sassoon library was a building much ahead of its time it had lovely stone stairs and a portrait medallion of David.The Bombay university is opposite the Oval maidan ,it is almost an exact copy of the Notre Dame.At the side of it is the Rajabai Tower built by Premchand Roychand.He was the first broker in India to speak english. He built in memory of his mother who was blind.
She stuck to the jain rules for eating during sunset by waiting for the bells to chime. The last building on the tour was the Bombay High Court built before the construction deadline costing less than the projected amount.It is built in the French Gothic style with a lot of corinthian pillars. There are two statues on the pointed turrets, one is mercy joining hands and one is justice with a weighing scale. What a walk. Hope to go on another one soon.