A very strange article in the Telegraph, commenting on efforts to create beautified zones in certain sections of Calcutta. The author asks, first -
"What sort of an eye would find Calcutta beautiful? Some would argue that such a gaze would have to be blinded with love. Or else, foreign enough to find in bad taste and dreariness exotic forms of the postcolonial. There is a certain slant of light in which a garbage heap, a roadside urinal, clouds of exhaust, a shopping mall, NRI apartments, or even a flyover might become radiant with beauty."
Thereby suggesting that s/he has already pre-judged the question of Calcutta's "beauty". S/he then claims that -
"At the core of Bengali public culture lies a form of irredeemable bad taste. This is as evident in the heaped-up gaudiness of the Marble Palace as in the ridiculous statues of regional heroes that have replaced the city’s imperial pantheon."
I don't understand how the Marble Palace, originally conceived as a private pleasure house, rather than a facet of "Bengali public culture" proves the argument (later examples include the New Market, designed by a decidedly non-Bengali architect R Bayney of the East India Railway Company). While one may criticise Bengal (and Bengalis) for a roster of vices, poor cultural taste isn't usually high on that list. In the final paragraph -
"It is surely significant that there has evolved no “Bengal School” of architecture worth speaking of, apart from the still-born Tagorean whimsies in Santiniketan. So that beautifying Calcutta is merely an exercise in conserving its colonial buildings — architecturally, the only good things to have happened to it."
Err, as anyone who's lived in North Calcutta would attest, there are some beautiful houses there, as also schools, University buildings and the like, which could do with some government upkeep, and are just as deserving of praise as the "colonial buildings". Perhaps the author should get out more often?
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I think you have let off the Calcutta Hater quite lightly. I had read somewhere that the great GBS had said to the effect that age has nothing to do with wisdom as otherwise the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men. It is the capacity to absorb that is important as otherwise the moron of 45 years would be twice as knowledgeable as an average and normal 22 year old!
I live in Calcutta now after I and my family had been chased out by the East Pakistanis few decades ago. But Calcutta has adopted me with open arms without any recrimination or racial hatred as is endemic to many "civilised" cities of the world. Some one had once called Calcutta the armpit of the world, whilst the poet Harindranath Chattopadhaya, brother of Sarojini Naidu, the Nightangale of India (as Gandhi called her)wrote with pride,"I have smelled the sweat off the workers' armpits." Its all perspective man,and nothing else.
If all the cities of the world were to be the same characterless concrete jungles,like say Shanghai, which some RNIs (resident non-Indians like Sam Pitroda) go ga-ga over as its skyline rapidly catches up with that of New York, the suicide rates amongst the urban townsmen would go up exponentially due to sheer boredom arising out of the sameness everywhere.
Unfortunately,Calcutta does not belong to the Bengali but to a class of hirudineans who suck Calcutta and Calcuttans and transfer their liquidity to their native place that are somewhere in the cowbelts of the Indian subcontinent. The cultured Bengali has been pushed out into the suburbs and beyond of Calcutta as the leeches compete with each other for the same limited real estate that Lord Clive had once made famous. The old theatre halls and bioscope houses that the Bengalis had frequented for generations are being demolished to be replaced by shopping malls and Multiplexes that are built ,stocked and frequented by the progeny of the parasites for spending the ill gotten income of their begetters that had not been declared to the State's Revenue departments.
The Bengali is the world's foremost iconoclast. He almost gets a perverse pleasure out of being different as he goes around breaking things up which have reached cult figure status as Jyoti Basu the previous Chief Minister of West Bengal realised to his own peril when he tried to overreach himself to become India's Prime Minister. The Bengali is not a pure race in the lines that Hitler thought the Germans were. A Bengali has too many disparate streams of blood running in his veins. The sheer sweep of the variety of talent the repertoire of the Bengali in every stream of human endeavour is primarily owed to that of having inherited this diversity through a natural selection due to the various races that had conquered Bengal , married into and settled down on the rich alluvial banks of the mighty Ganga. Even Nirad C Chaudhuri wrote better English than most Englishmen ever will. Or take the case of Amar Gopal Bose
Inventor of Bose Speakers Technology and Founder of Bose Corporation of Philadelphia who arguably makes the world's best audio equipments today. No actor in Bollywood has ever scaled the heights as Ashok Kumar (Ganguli)or as a singer of Hindi film songs as his younger brother Kishore. Alauddin Khan the greatest classical musician after Tansen, his son Ali Akbar Khan and son-in-law Pandit Ravi Shankar are all sons of the soil of Calcutta.Isn't Nora Jones half a Bengali herself?
Bengal has given India its greatest and the most numerous list of saints of the Hindu pantheon. Any one of them born in any other country starved of such seers would have become messiahs whose followers would have drawn their direct lineage to God Himself.
The Bengali's only problem is his lack of self-confidence undermined by the politics of the control freaks of the Left that have always kept him on the leash of collective wrangling. Every Bengali thinks he is incapable accomplishing anything alone. That is why a Sourav Ganguli has reached iconic status in a hero worshipping Bengal that is starved of any real heroes. Had Ganguli not been there,would it have been Bipasa Basu? Ugh!
When a few Bengalis sit on a park bench,their discussions on Sachin Tendulkar's latest century sounds like as if they are likely come to blows any moment. Each is sure of his own version of Tendulkar's motives to flirt with that wide ball that got him caught at the slips to bring an end to an otherwise glorious innings even though Sachin himself may not have been so sure what had happened.
No two Bengalis agree on anything excepting the CPI(M) which in reality is Amra Bangali like the parochial Shiv Sena of Maharashtra. It is not because of the Bengali's love for Marx or Lenin but because the Marxists have kept the cause of Bengal's frustrations focussed onto a supposed obdurate Centre ruled by "non-Bengalis" by a subtle and at times not too subtle fanning of Bengali sub-nationalism. No one can fool a Bengali as well as another Bengali can and the party in power in Calcutta for the last three decades is 100% Bengali.
What those who criticise Calcutta miss is its vibrancy, its boisterousness of commitment, its pulsating life-force to suvive despite all odds and concern for the underdog. Anyone who has lost all hope or the zest to live should come to Calcutta. On a misty cold winter morning on a visit to a Kali Temple I saw a destitute family lying huddled under an assortment of tattered rags on the pavement,fast asleep and oblivious of a world passing them by and a city waking up reluctantly to another day. Within the heads that lay on a bundle of wordly possesions what doubled as a pillow, was a head of a little puppy that was wedged between that of his young master and his mother. That's Calcutta for you.
If you have the will to observe you will see many such vignettes of slices of life that will renew your faith in mankind that forces itself out of the squaller that are all man made. But the spirit of renewal that springs forth over and over again is something almost divine, like that of Mother Theresa, who came to teach Geography to girls of priveledged parents, but soon realised the futility of her existence and plunged herself into the heart of serving the dying destitutes of Calcutta's pavements. Had Calcutta not been Calcutta, there would have been no Saint Theresa of Calcutta.
It is easy to despise Calcutta unlike Johnny Cash who sang,"San Quentin I hate every inch of you..." But Cash got himself into San Quentin due to his own follies only to leave the place later, and hopefully a saner and wiser man. But Calcutta grows on you. The longer you stay here the harder you will find to leave it behind. By a strange and almost contrary coincidence I have always found that those who profess to hate Calcutta the most are amongst those who have gained much from Calcutta.No wonder Calcutta is taking so long to get back on its own feet once again. It is too caught up in giving of itself to those ungratefuls who give back very little in return.
60% of Kolkata's population is non Bengali. And most of the non Bengalis are poor but hard working migrants from Bihar, Jharkhand and other states. A lot of the Bengalis you see on the streets are illegal Bangladeshis who have become votebanks for the Communist Party (the Shiv Sena equivalent of Bengal) and the Trinamool Congress (the RSS eqquivalent of Bengal). The rich are mostly Marwaris from Rajasthan who exploit the hard working Bihari and Jharkhandi labourers and hoard the riches. The tiny Bengali middle class is stuck in clerkship and harmonium - tabla - Rabindrsangeet - courtesy the "revolutionary" Communist Party of India. So Kolkata really isn't a Bengali city and it never was post independence. Kolkata is basically a Bihari labour class city with a Marwari upper class and sandwiched in between is a tiny Bengali middle class. We may as well declare it the capital of Bihar. The only Bengali or Bangla metropolis in the world is Dhaka. So to blame Bengalis for Kolkata's architectural mess is pointless. Go to Dhaka.
I am a hyderabadi, when i entered this ugly city my first reaction was "oh shit" where have i come. After traveling in the a/c taxi in hyderabad and an old to be repaired ambassador taxi a back breaking journey indeed. The sanitation is the worst. People are un-welcoming with their embarrassing love towards bengali and discrimitation towards other languages. The roadside junk food the main staple diet of kolkatans is a no no to any rational indian. May be bengalis don't watch TV about the basic hygine. Mr. Ramdoss do something and pass a law man. Else kolkata will remain in the communist shackles and give away the hygine factor.
MAY GOD SAVE KOLKATA AND THE PEOPLE WHO CAME TO KOLKATA.
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