Sunday Posts

Like millions of my compatriots, I am watching the news coming from Calcutta (now Kolkata) with anger and a sense of shame. First, there was a horrific act of rape and murder of a Junior Doctor inside a government hospital. This showed not only how insecure women are, but also how broken down the healthcare and education systems are in the city. Then, it was apparent that this was no ordinary murder. The hospital administration, the police and the State government rushed in to destroy evidence and cover up through any means possible. After that, when people protested and took to the streets in an unprecedented way, the arrogance of the administration was plain. The Police Commissioner, despite the litany of failure (including Police Officers getting arrested for destroying evidence), would not resign; the Chief Minister would not meet the protesting doctors in a transparent way (they are demanding the meeting be recorded or live streamed); the bureaucrats from once-glorious Indian Admi...

Calcutta needs a new start. The city which I call home has earned a bad name, but its reputational problems have more to do with the politics of India than economic fundamentals. The city, the second most populous in India after Mumbai, is the third largest city economy in India, presiding over a mostly prosperous agricultural economy and a strategic state. Yet, people don't tend to see it that way: India's geopolitical obsession with Pakistan and Kashmir keeps minds focused on its Western frontiers, and a succession of opposition party governments in West Bengal (the last time Congress ruled the state was in 1977) ensured that the state did not feature in the Central Government's list of priorities. But this is changing - there is increasing realisation of the geopolitical challenges and opportunities of the Indian East - and one would hope that this would bring about a change, if only gradual change, in Indian policy. But any conversation about change must b...

There is a Kolkata protocol. As any outsider reaches the new shiny Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport and steps outside the glass doors, and looks into the waiting and loitering multitude just outside the gate, along with a few indifferent guards, a few skinny and bespectacled men trying to look officious with identity cards hanging around their necks, the noise, the sunlight and the general atmosphere of hustle reaches her - she remembers the name: Mother Teresa! As the first act of politeness - as well as of sounding world-aware - she would usually ask those waiting to receive her about Mother Teresa. And, then, the other party would usually start talking about Kolkata's great cultural heritage, its assortment of four or five Nobel Laureates, including an implausible Ronald Ross, who did part of his research in Kolkata (and therefore, has a street named after him), and an apparently disingenuous claim on Amartya Sen, who went to college in the City but have found ...

This post is not about an idea that just popped up in my head, but about something that I saw. And, that, though uncharacteristic, is most appropriate. I just came across, while reading a book about 'Genius Clusters', a 'Hindu' theory of creativity! I am reading Eric Weiner's Geography of Genius , a concoction of travelogue and psychological theories, representing a tour through spots of great creative flourishing in human history. I am about half-way through, and have already travelled through Athens, Hangzhou, Florence and Edinburgh - and currently in Calcutta! It is a chatty read, serious ideas and wackiness bound together, and oftentimes, as a book of this nature would invariably be, too simplistic. But, every now and then, there is an idea worth all my effort, and my current pulse-rusher is this notion that Hindus have a different notion of creativity. Here is the argument in brief: That, in Judeo-Christian, currently Western tradition, the idea of cr...

I have three data points about Kolkata, which I talk about often.  First, Kolkata was the first Indian city to reach a million population, and only the second city in Asia to do so (Tokyo is the other one). Second, it is the only city in the whole world, in this day and age of urban expansion, to have lost population in the last ten years. The loss was marginal, and it is still a very populous city, but this is not good. Third, it is the only Indian metropolis with abundant supply of drinkable water. Assuming that water is going to be a big issue in the next twenty years, Kolkata seems secure as a City. These three data points capture the usual narrative. We often talk about the city's illustrious past, as the Second Capital of the British Empire, Capital of India and as home to many leading modern Indian intellectuals, a place of learning and a hotbed of Indian nationalism. We also hope about its promising future, pointing to various geographic, demographic and e...

I am on my way to India, again. This has now a two-week cycle for me. So, all this, Sunday morning breakfast at Gatwick, midnight queues at Indian airports to scan my body for African diseases, the familiar food in Emirates, feel usual. I am already tired from journeying so much (an experienced traveller told me, only those who don't travel think travel is glorious!) and the journeys now are marked by a strange combination of boredom, tiredness and total lack of enthusiasm, which is unusual for me.  Particularly because I am going to India, and as it happens, I would spend a few days in Kolkata this time, a city I still consider my home. Notwithstanding the fact that I am so disheartened by the illiberal turn in India, Kolkata never fails to attract, amaze and make me feel comfortable. Yet, it is one of the cities which are too ensnared in its comfort zone - and surely it attracts because if is my comfort zone too, one thing I try so hard to escape all the time - and it fails to m...

Kolkata is India's third largest city, its former capital and a desperately poor one. It is home for me, and whatever I write about it - and I keep writing about it - is never impartial. I can see, like everyone else, its broken politics, its stilted society, its broken infrastructure: However, if there is one city I would live in if all my wishes are granted, it will be Kolkata. This is indeed more about me than about the City, which has perhaps changed far more than I did, despite my life abroad and all that. However, this is more than nostalgia: I have never been a resident of Kolkata, living all my life in a suburb, and while I went to college in the city, I didn't know the city that well till fairly late in my life. And, this is not about its culture, which most Kokata residents are intensely proud of: While my cultural identity remains irredeemably Bengali and linked to Kolkata, I am also aware of the deep conservatism and class consciousness that pervades the Kolkata s...

A much maligned city, Calcutta of the black hole, when several Englishmen perished locked up in a small room, on a hot summer night on the 20th June, 1756, lived in Western memories in different forms, lately in the ghastly revocations of its poverty and squalor by the likes of V S Naipaul and Gunter Grass. With the international spotlight on Mother Teresa's work, it was confirmed as a terrible place, somewhere you may want to send your charity money to but never wanted to go yourself: The Bengali diffidence in sticking with its Communist government, despite its misery, made an Indian Prime Minister call it a 'dying city'. And, indeed, it turned out that way, as the only metropolis in the world whose population has declined in the last decade. But there is another tale, which hardly gets told. Kolkata was one of the two cities in Asia in the early 1900 with more than a million people, the other being Tokyo. The capital of the British India till 1911, when King George ...

Kolkata, I would always point out, is unique among the major metropolises around the world as its population is FALLING. Even if this fall is only marginal, at this time of unparallelled urbanisation, that marginal fall in population indicates decay. Ghost cities aren't that unusual: A walk down the Piotrkowska Street in Łódź, the third largest city in Poland and one with declining population after its textile industry disappeared, is highly recommended if anyone doubted that this could happen in modern times. I know from my time in Łódź what happens when an inward-looking city meets globalisation: I imagine in my nightmare the side streets of Kolkata completely abandoned, an inescapable darkness and decline, where despair brings more despair and lead people to give up and abdicate to a self-interested, lumpen-bourgeois leadership.  However, even Łódź is turning around. The nightmare of Piotrkowska Street ends as one steps into Piłsudskiego and the all new steel-and-glass outs...

I wrote a note on Kolkata, the city I come from and would always belong to, in July 2010. Since then, the post attracted many visitors and comments, mostly critical, as most people, including those from Kolkata, couldn't see any future for the city. My current effort, some 18 months down the line, is also prompted by a recent article in The Economist, The City That Got Left Behind , which echo the pessimism somewhat.  I, at least emotionally, disagree to all the pessimism: After all Kolkata is home and I live in the hope of an eventual return. Indeed, some change has happened since I wrote my earlier post: The geriatric Leftist government that ruled the state for more than 30 years was summarily dispatched,  and was replaced by a lumpen-capitalist populist government. Kolkata looked without a future with the clueless leftists at the helm; it now looks without hope. However, apart from bad governance, there is no reason why Kolkata had to be poor and hopeless. It sits ...

Here is a movie I loved: Loved so much that I saw it four times within my return flights between London and Calcutta. This beautifully crafted Woody Allen movie, third in his series of exploring various great European cities (after Matchpoint in London and Vicky Christina Barcelona in Barcelona), puts middle class Americans in an alien setting yet again. But this is a different movie from the depressing Matchpoint or the erotic Barcelona, this is magical. Like the other two movies, this is indeed about love and human frailties, with an acute understanding of American (shall we say universal) middle class values and lifestyles transposed in the middle of an unfamiliar, yet stereotyped, setting. I shall be honest: I love the movie because I love Paris. Those who know me know that I shall much rather live in Paris than anywhere else in the world. And, this movie touches my heart, exactly where it matters: Isn't my greatest wish to escape my conformist surroundings and be able to l...

Let's start with a disclaimer. I am biased when I talk about Calcutta. I love the city. Wherever I am in the world, I belong to Calcutta . And, yes, some day, I shall go and live there. Some day soon! I have stated the reasons before and I love repeating this. Because Calcutta is home. That's it, really. Not because I was born there, but because it is the city where I shall never feel lost. I know Calcutta the way one gets to know one's own home: its alleys and corners, its sounds and smells. And, therefore, there is no other city for me like that. One can only love one city in one lifetime. But I don't live in Calcutta. That's a sad truth. I keep saying I love London too. I love its parks and benches, its narrow roads and drizzles, its red buses and black taxis, endless line of umbrellas on the rainy days, libraries, Museums and theatres. I enjoy living here, but you can get the sense - I love London in the image of Calcutta. Or, Calcutta the way I saw it, remembe...