In the mid-19th century, winds of change were rushing towards Dharamsala, threatening to shatter its quiet calm forever. The British Viceroy at the time, Lord Elgin, had fallen in love with this pretty town in the Kangra Valley. Plans were afoot to transform Dharamsala into the summer capital of the Indian sub-continent. But it was not to be. Elgin died and was buried in the graveyard of the Church of St John in the Wilderness nearby and calm descended on the town again.

History doesn't tell us whether the Kangra Valley was shattered at the loss of potential power and prestige, or grateful to be spared the fate of Shimla, which became the summer capital instead. But what the citizens of Dharamsala didn't know yet was that a boy born to a peasant family in another land would one day indeed put their town on the world map. That boy's name was Lhamo Dhondrub, but he is known all over the world as the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. He came to India in the 1960s, exiled from the country of his birth and settled finally in the former British cantonment of McLeodganj in Upper Dharamsala. The entire Tibetan Buddhist faith has its focus in the person of the Dalai Lama. Thousands of people therefore beat a path to wherever the Dalai Lama may be, and he has been in McLeodganj for the last four decades.

So, perhaps, fame was in Dharamsala's kismat after all.