Old World Metropolis
A visit to Calcutta can make for a humbling experience. The illusory 'Millennium City' of Gurgaon, where I reside, is a power-less, green-less, soon-to-be-waterless, pot-holed, filthy, dysfunctional, pig-infested suburb dotted with gated islands of affluence filled with delusional folk convinced that India is a superpower-in-the-making. Crowded Calcutta, by comparison, is more 'real' and presents a civilisational change. The roads are scrubbed clean—it must rank as one of the cleanest cities in India today—and many are brighter lit than Mumbai.
The traffic is still miserable, and the pace is slow, but Calcutta is miles ahead of the faux Millennium City in essential infrastructure. The food, of course, remains cheap and top class. As I tucked into the iconic Chicken a La Kiev at Mocambo on a packed weekday evening, a couple at the next table discussed the sexual revolution in the West, while another behind me fought over why Manchester United's hoary history made it the world's best football club. At a book shop in Salt Lake on Sunday morning, I exchanged banter with two middle-aged gentlemen hunting for books on Jinnah and by Solzhenitsyn. Wasn't Solzhenitsyn a bit outdated, wondered one gent. The other thought for a moment and said, "But then, that was the only counter-narrative available when we were growing up!
No comments:
Post a Comment