Sunday Posts

Kolkata needs a fresh start.  One of the first mega-cities in Asia, and $150 Billion economy, has fallen from grace, somewhat. It is no way a 'dying city' as Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, called it, but it has decisively lost its urban glory. The seat of a brilliant creative 'awakening' in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth century, now the city loses its aspirational young people as they migrate to other cities in search of educational and economic opportunities.  Once the home of many of India's largest corporations and many of the big multinational corporations, the City experienced an exodus of business and talent in its dark days in the mid-seventies, something that never came back.  Steeped in dreams of changing the world, this City lived through its street-fighting years of the late Sixties, something that was brutally crushed by the authoritarian Central Government of Indira Gandhi; the end of dreams meant degeneration, as th...

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...