In this book, Abhinav traces the career of Sorabjee. While we do get a glimpse of Sorabjee’s personal life, the focus is primarily on Sorabjee the lawyer and not Sorabjee the person. We do learn about Sorabjee’s ancestors – well to do business folks who had the means to engage legal luminaries like Chimanlal Setalvad for their commercial disputes.
We also glean interesting trivia from India’s past, like the Great Indian Peninsula Railway ferrying special fast trains between Poona and Bombay to facilitate the wealthy to relish in horse racing. Horse racing in India also gave birth to the totalizator, a mechanical device intrinsic to the system of betting in horse racing, where the payoff to winners would come from the pool of bets, permitting multiple winners and for the house to make a profit. While Bombay saw the totalizator in the early 1910’s, the Americas saw it only in 1933. There is also a wide variety of information on Parsi life in those days – how society operated, how schools were divided, and what it took for a community of immigrants to become custodians of Indian business.
Source: Barandbench
