Category: Calcutta

The arm-stretched tree-man at the Republic of Nandan. Photo by author. It is difficult to believe that there was a time when CPI(M) did not resemble a felled behemoth that was howling away on its way to dusty death. In those days it did many other things. And it also did Kaalture, so to say. It had aspired to be a party that stood erect for the working classes while sitting down to sip tea and discuss cinema with the…

Top shot of coffee served at a cafe in Calcutta, December 2018. Photo by author. For I have known them all already, known them all / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.  — T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.   If you are brave enough to suggest changes in an Eliot poem go ahead and substitute the ‘coffee’ in the above lines with tea and you will probably…

Lion in the making. Kumortuli, Calcutta. Autumn of 2009. Photo by author. Kumortuli’s fame is in its transience. Like the Spring Flower, it bursts into activity, fame and business for no more than three months in a year. Only that it does so during autumn and not spring. But in that short span, it enjoys a lot of attention. Or so has been the case for the last two centuries or so. So much so that over the years, Kumortuli…

A Durga idol. Autumn, 2014. Photo by author. If there is one word to describe the explosion of gaiety amidst a wrecked urban landscape, it would probably be ‘flourish’, as Shakespeare used it. Writes Sayandeb Chowdhury. Shakespeare, otherwise so abundant with words and the magical incantations of poetry was, in keeping with the norms of Elizabethan playwriting and Globe Theatre conventions, severely frugal in matters of stage direction. Hence in many a Shakespearean play, after the entry of the principal…

A lane in North Kolkata. Photo by author Kolkata must bear the cross of being the centre of gravity of a political culture that only knows how to traumatise millions Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe/ through me is the way among the lost people. …Before me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter! The dismal Situation waste and wilde/…

The bars fill up the day before. Oly Pub, 2009. Photo by author. Last Wednesday I walked into a popular pub in Kolkata. Olypub, as it is commonly called, was packed with customers by the time the twilight gave way to the neons. It was too early for the regular bench grabbers — the usual office crowd. So what was the occasion? A man approached me, guessing my perplexity. He whispered, ‘they are stacking for the bandh tomorrow.’ That was…

A typical Calcutta day. Photo by author. The city’s cobbled roads may not hear the twinkling sounds of the iconic human carriage anymore… If a loss is just not personal, if the loss is just not about war, if the loss is historical and cultural, the abandonment of the handheld rickshaw is a loss for Kolkata. Because, with the alabaster memorial erected for a dead queen, the living, sweating rhythm of a weary rickshawallah pulling his cart through the…