KoLKatA

8th April 2009:
This is the day I flew ALL ALONE for the first time in 27 years. I lost most of this landmark of a journey to overpowering slumber. The much touted “long” flight to Kolkata was not long, not when I would have liked to catch up on a few more hours of sleep. I flew across the country in just a few winks. It took a few winks to get to Kolkata! Hell!

Colin described Kolkata as “a city that is like a beautiful, intellectual woman one wants to have a relationship with”. To me Kolkata is like a melody; painfully tugging at my heart and bringing a lump to my throat. It swamped me in nostalgia even though I have no associations with this city. I am thinking Kolkata is a wrong place to be in if one is looking to get over a relationship! Or I would think it is a bad place even if one is happily in one! It rather dramatically pushes you into catacombs you thought you found your way out of! I think Kolkata rakes up sweet pain. I do not know how the real Kolkata is. I never will. My perception of it will forever be affected by Tagore’s stories and The City of Joy. Maybe these poets, authors and filmmakers made Kolkata hard to be just another city, maybe Kolkata IS difficult to be just another city. The conclusion is it is very well NOT just another city, whether it owes this to its artistic portrayal or to itself.

My first impression of the streets of Kolkata was that I will NEVER have to go WITHOUT anything here! The streets, all of them, are lined with such an abundance of tiny shops seeming like they are selling everything under the sun or almost, that all I need to do to get what I want in Kolkata is take a short walk! In an hour-long drive around the city I saw shops, cafes, multi-cuisine hotels, residential buildings, ponds, gardens, colleges, schools, hospitals, a fine arts academy (of course!), a mall, a crossword, a theatre and there was not a doubt left in my mind about Kolkata and what it got! It got everything. And it shows it. One doesn’t have to wait to get to the market area to see the market, to the residential area to see homely homes and to the corporate area to see offices! Markets are everywhere, people live everywhere and everything co-exists everywhere. In extremely narrow lanes opposite Tolly Club, are quaint houses with indecipherable names (I bet they are worth getting to know. Bengali names always are), in Bangla script, adorned with typical green shutter windows (dust coated but charming) and trees. What are not charming are the aberrant and abrupt skyscrapers. They fail to blend. They herald a new Kolkata rising with an avaricious eagerness, towering over the old city and looking tawdry next to the existing homes. Amidst bustling narrow streets, small houses, cycle rickshaws, rickety blue buses and the anachronistic trams are the anomalous skyscrapers! Kolkata appears to be in the middle of a skyscraper epidemic. In the midst of a Heightened Mania!

Kolkata, by virtue of what it means to me and does to me is NOT a place for me to be alone in. Or be “without work” in. Kolkata should not see me idle. I react to idleness in Kolkata!