Kolkota – The City of Joy

Well yesterday I was in Kolkota (Calcutta of yesteryears) on an official trip and this happened to be my third trip to this rather sleepy city (or is it???). It definitely has a populace which has a kind of laidback attitude to how they lead their life (or so I feel cos I am in Mumbai – Bombay of yesteryears – the city with a mechanical life). The city, like most cities in India, has some its splendid monuments and tourist spots in the South while the North as usual has a very dirty look and feel to it.

The first time I was in Kolkota (some ten years back) I was overawed by the engineering of the Howrah bridge….The enormity of the structure and the jetties flowing beneath the bridge in the waters of Hoogly…..Oh that was a sight…..But right beside it I also saw one of the most dirty locales anywhere in the world….. This time around when I went to Strand Road on an official meeting (very near Howrah) I just wanted to check how the place looked…..Hey it bloody well hasn’t changed…..Whether for the Good I don’t know…..but people out there seems to be very oblivious of the filth among which they live in…..

Then I drifted to do more official work and for lunch I went to this lovely little restaurant called Moulin Rouge in Park Street (the most lively road In Kolkota) with a batchmate of mine – Debu….It was great to meet him after a longtime and we had a nice cozy lunch at that restaurant. This restaurant supposedly had at one point in time been the most visited night clubs in Kolkota in fifties or so ppl tell me…..It also was a part of the famous caberae number of Rekha in the recent movie Parineeta. That movie was supposedly based on like in Cal in 1960s….Hey it has not changed so much after that….

Then post lunch I had an hour and a half to kill and just a little walk outside on Park Street I found Oxford Bookstore. At Oxford for the first time a book’s cover caught my attention with its name – “Everything that you wanted to know about the Simple Theory of Relativity E=mc 2 and were afraid to ask”…. I read the book for about an hour and I was so immersed that I felt I needed to buy this book…..It cost me INR 150 (INR 100 higher than what I normally pay for a book) but It is worth it….. It describes about various things that I feared reading in Physics……Oh I repent why I did not choose Physics……I have finished only 30 pages of the book and hey its just too good…..The language in the book is so laymen language that I thoroughly enjoyed it…..Must go through it fully as it is very interesting….

Then I drifted back for some long official work. In the meanwhile it was pouring in Kolkota (the first showers of the monsoon) and how people welcomed it…..I felt I had brought the showers to the City of Joy :- ) . In the evening I met with Ajay, an ex-colleague of mine at office, in Hyatt at salt lake in kolkota. Salt lake is a beautiful locale in Kolkota near the airport and houses the Salt lake stadium and a lot of other beautiful scenery. The chat at the coffee house was nice as we caught upon a lot of stuff on each others work atmosphere and also recalled the last one years’ work experience at the office. It was a good evening drink we had…the mango squash was too good….

Then came the most hated part of the day…..My flight back to Mumbai…..I expected to reach in three hours including the normal one hour the flights hover around the destination for their turn to be allowed to land…….But hey the Indian airport infrastructure was much worse….I hovered around for an hour and a half and to top it there was no bloody Bus coach to take us from the flight to the terminal…..We waited for another thirty minutes and then got to the terminal…..The four hour ordeal was over…..

Well Kolkota despite being sleepy and laidback had its own charm….The city is seeing a lot of development recently under the CM Mr.Buddhadeb Bhattacharya……Some changes that I coul really witness were the number of malls, the science city, the IT offices and the flyovers have started dotting the landscapes of the sleepy city….Maybe the city wishes to reclaim its lost glory as the primary business center in India.