My love-hate relationship with Calcutta

You might have already figured this out from my last name, that I’m a Bengali. While I no longer live in Calcutta (yes, I come from a time when it still used to be Calcutta or Cal, not Kolkata), I can’t seem to stay away from it either. It has a strange inexplicable way of pulling me back.

When I left Calcutta for good, I knew about all the things I’d never miss about the city. The never-ending traffic jams, the sticky cheep-cheep weather, the grime and filth that cake the city and the chaotic streets belching smoke and squalor. What a relief it was to escape this veritable madhouse! But in a few years, I was yearning for the gob-smacking Bong food, the laidback adda and its crumbling buildings that speak of a dying glory. And there started my love-hate relationship with Cal.

Victoria Memorial

I love how time slows down

In a world that’s increasingly getting faster, Calcutta has its own set of internal clocks. Here, time is not measured in minutes or hours but rather with khawa-dawa (eating), adda and ghora-phera (outings in the city). Never-ending tea-breaks to long glorious lunches; the laidback attitude towards work leave people to pursue other worldly interests (like telebhaaja and rosogolla).

A tram groaning to a stop

Baghbazar, North Calcutta

On the flipside, if time runs slow then well, everything happens slowly. The trams trudge at a snail’s pace; the traffic jams take forever to clear; work goes on haltingly; municipal developments take decades to see the light of day and nothing ever changes. Taking a step back, it’s kind of scary that in a world that’s moving at a break-neck speed, Calcutta might actually be regressing (of course it’s a debatable point).

People don’t gossip. They have adda

The concept of cha and adda is something that’s innately Bengali. It’s almost like we were born with it. Whiling away a Tuesday afternoon cracking jokes with old cronies is the perfect example of a day well spent.

Coffee House, College Street

Ok, enough talk. When does the lunch break get over? - Aarey chap niyo na dada (don’t stress about it brother!)

I love...Nom nom nom nom!

In Cal, if I’m eating breakfast, I’m thinking about what to eat for lunch; and at lunch I think about what to eat for snacks and that way one day rolls into another. And why not? When there’re such delectable delights to be found at every corner.

Malancho: One of my favourite telebhaja (a deep fried snack) joints in Hatibagan

Inversely, if food is the impetus to life you can bet it isn’t the healthy stuff you’ll be eating all day long.

Something old, something new, something blue

Littered with simple joys across the city, Calcutta is never in dearth of unique experiences. As the erstwhile capital of British ruled India, Cal is the home to some of the most beautiful Victorian era architecture accentuated with touches of Gothic styles.

Victoria Memorial

The Bartaman Patrika office

While most of these buildings have been renovated over the years, you can’t say the same for the old forgotten Calcutta that has its own charm of decay. Lost in a labyrinth of bylanes these crumbling bungalows speak of bygone wealth and glory. Falling from disrepair and disregard, you wonder how the tables were turned on these families over the decades.

Exploriing College Street

Old rundown bungalow in the depths of Girish Park

Somewhere in the bylanes of Hatibagan

I believe I’m not the only one with mixed feelings about Calcutta. The first time I went to Delhi, I was awed by its infrastructure; in Bombay I was taken by how everything moved faster – the people, traffic, work, you name it. But in Calcutta, you feel the city throbbing around you with every heartbeat. Anything but peaceful and yet within its veins runs this quiet complacency amidst a city thrown into perpetual chaos. You either love it or hate it or accept it for what it is; a melting pot of conflicting emotions.

Do you have such a love-hate relationship with any other cities? Would love to hear all about it.

When Joan Didion said, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, I think she meant - the stories we delude ourselves with.

I used to think that if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer through the noon and end it with a Thud! Whack! Clanggg! before I hit the sack. But once I had a hammer, I realised I wasn’t hammering as much I said I would.

A road-tripper’s recipe to beach-hopping: Sri Lanka south coast

Nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done. Well-wishers said it probably shouldn’t be done. The fact that the mercury would rise to its zenith high in the peak summer didn’t stop us from travelling to the southern coast of Sri Lanka last month. After a rickety eight hour bus-ride that saw us descending into the plains from the hill country, we reached the bustling sea-board town of Weligama. If you are travelling along the same route, keeping a day in hand for the Yala National Park would seem like the most obvious choice. However, short of money and time – my fiancé and I headed straight for the holy trinity of sun, sea and sand. It would be safe to say that any road trip involves the road (duh!), a pair of trusty-ish wheels and at least one companion (who you will most likely fall out with at least once a day. But regardless the offense these silly skirmishes that start with ‘let’s stop for a cola’ have a knack to smooth itself out soon enough). Like life, which’s about the journey and n

Rude Awakening Series: You might find it offensive. But so is the world around us.

It has been one year and nine months since my last entry. A lot has happened since. The dude who used to say “You’re fired” on reality television is now the very real President of United States of A, Delhi beat Beijing to become the most polluted city in the world by a chest-thumping margin, the planet regardless of our skeptical opinions has continued to become warmer - putting the birds and bees out of business. On the other hand, some things haven’t changed. North Korea is still batshit ballistic, China ghost towns are at best dead, Japan is LOCO but still zen, fortunes (as usual) have waxed and waned to the changing tides of tax reforms, share prices and demonetisation. If there is a hidden lesson over the months that I have learnt, it is this - nothing changes or gets better in this world unless we act (as opposed to react) upon it. And it is with this foolhardy notion that I once again set about to write; to abuse, to anger, with a direct intent to offend the blogosphere.

Three salad dressings with a side of honesty

Salads. The healthy-and-mighty of all meals. The snooty accompaniment to a glass of rosé. The veritable rainbow on your plate. In Fran Lebowitz’s words, a salad is not a meal – it is a style. Well, as long as ‘style’ includes a fair amount of mud under one’s fingernails – I couldn’t agree more with Fran. Sure, it’s fashionable to eat a salad – but there’s a certain panache to going down on all fours in wet mud, rummaging through fresh lettuce pods every morning and wondering what you’re going to dress them in. While it’s far from the fashion statement that salad has come to symbolise, growing your own food definitely is a style of its own. There are many categories of salad snobs – the ingredient minimalist, the chop-it-right evangelists and the brigade of dressing-goes-first, but the only consensus between the salad factions is that you don’t actually need packaged dressing. A homemade vinaigrette made from basic ingredients lives just as happily on your refrigerator door, not to ment

Other Names #12: Kaamkar Das

The rain pelted incessantly for six years and five months and twenty-two days over the city of Someplace. There were periods of drizzle when people stepped out but soon, they began to realise that the respite was only a forecast for more rain. At first life came to a standstill and then boredom set in. People stopped going out altogether so establishments had no reason to stay open. The public gardens were flooded and turned into veritable marshlands with crocodiles and snakes which put an end to walking. A thick layer of moss covered the asphalt under the waterlogged streets that made cars and motorbikes skid off their paths and often into death. People received their weekly supplies of grains from a government helicopter that came twice a week to drop sealed packets onto the terraces. Time stretched into infinite seconds over Someplace and its people came to be characterised by their glassy eyes, wet yellowish skin and a perennial dry crust around their mouths. Kaamkar Das was one of

Project Other Names #7: Dr. Prarthamesh Potty

Professor Potty scratched these words on the blackboard, punching the period at the end for dramatic effect. He turned to face his class of forty. Forty miserable, clueless schmucks, most of whom didn’t know the difference between a period and an ellipsis. And yet they thought a minor in Creative Writing would be a piece of cake. An easy grade to brighten up their mark sheet. He had overheard on his way to class, some of the students casually joke, “Next class…” proceeding to clutch their tummy and ejecting a fart-like sound from their mouth. The joke lacked half-a-decent punchline but regardless, the junior year would pick it up from their seniors, giving new life to a lame old gag. Professor Potty did not have a sense of humour. At least, none when it came to his name. You would think after years of being tormented by friends, foes, colleagues, relatives, lovers and eventually his own children as well, the professor would at least pretend to smile and take the power out of the old

Other Names #8 and #9: Sahil and Mira

It had been three years since Sahil had last seen Mira. A lot had changed (physically) for Sahil in that time. His jaw had hardened to an angular shape, he had lost that baby beard that everyone made fun of and the unruly curls had been tamed to a neat close crop. He had returned to civilisation - unrecognisable beyond repair, as his friends often remarked. So, it came as a surprise when Sahil found himself looking at Mira, untouched by the passage of time. She still had the look of an alert school girl. Head held high, a neat round chin, wide thin-lipped mouth, snub nose, bright eyes and a forehead that was often flushed with effort or appreciation. She was finishing her thesis in Sanskrit from Xavier’s when they were together. Sahil always marvelled at how much the professors delighted in her – as though they were grateful for anybody who still took up ancient languages, especially for someone so gifted – but they were always worried as well. The problem Mira used to say, was becau

Footnotes from college and my holiday in Istanbul that has nothing to do with the former

The following is best enjoyed with food or beverage that's a tad bit sour, bitter or whatever seasoning that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Besides teaching me calculus and semi-conductors that have been of no future consequence, the four years at an engineering college furnished me with an elementary knowledge of scientific thinking. I was glad to learn that the minds of people (themselves a product of natural causes) was a function of the brain subject to the laws of cause and effect, like any other part of their body. And that these laws were the same as those that governed the movements of star and atom. I exulted at the thought that the universe was no more than a vast machine in which every event was determined by a preceding event so that nothing could be other than what it was. These conceptions not only appealed to my dramatic instinct; they filled me with a sense of liberation. It gave me such satisfaction to learn that the Earth was a speck of mud whir

Other Names #10: Mrs. Ghosh

She sat on a wooden bench facing an empty communal pool, contemplating its green chlorinated waters, with her hand resting on the silver handle of her cane and thinking about death. The first time Mrs. Ghosh had visited Dolphin Square, she was no more than five herself. Her father, a district magistrate in the Calcutta high court and a skilled swimmer himself had unceremoniously doused her in the pool. It was the first of many days that would become her entire adolescent years. The pool was emptied and cleaned once every year in the winter. There had been numerous deaths at the bottom of the diving board but all of Calcutta’s best swimmers frolicked to the murky green pools to compete with children from nearby slums who inevitably turned out to be stronger and swifter in the district championships. Every second Sunday of the month, young people who couldn’t afford the membership fee of the government run swim club, competed against each other to earn their place by merit. It afforded t

Portrait of a criminal as a young thug

He is five feet and eleven inches tall, hundred and three kgs heavy, with sweaty arms and a glistening moustache, shoulder length black hair oiled and tied into a small ponytail. He has a wild demeanour and suspicious eyes. Beyond that, in his twenty-seven years he has piled up a tall and ugly police record: a multitude of arrests, from petty theft and battery to rape, narcotics offences - and all this without a single felony conviction, being officially guilty of nothing more than what any spirited citizen might commit in some drunken or violent moment of animal weakness. Word of caution: If you happen to get in an argument with our young criminal in the making - your chances of emerging unmaimed depends on the number of heavy-weight allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and naive fools.

MADTROTTER

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