Kolkattans love their vegetables. Every morning scores of vendors arrive at the city’s various markets from the suburbs with their wares, sell them by noon, and go back home by late afternoon. It’s the routine they follow every single day except during heavy monsoon when communication becomes difficult. Incidentally, when the large retail stores of […]
Lemon break – Kolkata style
If there is one characteristic that defines a city, I think it’d be how you eat on road. Why road? Because, of the millions who frequent a city everyday for hundreds of reasons, the majority cannot afford to fill in their stomach in the cool comfort of an upscale restaurant. On the question of affording, […]
3-legged rickshaws
Every city has its unique mode of commuting. Kolkata is no exception. Thus one can see hand-pulled rickshaws of the colonial past as well as the newly introduced Volvo buses on the road, not to speak of gleaming luxury sedans that glide by every now and then. Since all of them share the same road […]
EM Bypass – Tomorrow’s Chowringhee
Ironically, when the prospect of job and a decent future thereof was a far cry in the state a few years back, there was no shedding of tears for acquisition of land from farmers for developmental projects. The political parties virtually took no notice of government acquiring vast tracts of land for EM Bypass and […]
Viewing the rear
If you drive anything that moves on road in the city, chance is the thing you ride has a rear-view mirror fixed onto it. I call it an instrument, which you cannot do without unless you wish to mess up on the road that may result into unwanted incidents. Yet for all that it offers, […]
Place for loving
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.-: Albert Einstein :- Loving couples would like this Einstein quote for his take on relativity. What however is more real than the reality […]
Ultadanga at chaotic best
Bidhan Nagar, aka Ultadanga, is a busy place. Bidhan Nagar is actually the name of Salt Lake, the erstwhile satellite township now integrated into the city. It was named after West Bengal’s second illustrious Chief Minister, Bidhan Chandra Roy, who in late 50s had foreseen the need of the township to ease pressure on city […]
Kolkata’s moving boxes
They call them bus, but I feel they’re just cramped moving boxes. If you’ve ever bought sardines packed in tin cans, you’d find similarity with the condition of people who travel in Kolkata’s moving boxes in peak hours. What makes journey in them difficult is the fact that passengers have no comfort inside the bus […]
Earning on street
As they say, “Go to Kolkata. There is something you can always do to earn your bread.” So, people descend on the city from neighboring and even faraway places in search of livelihood. In course of time they mix with and become part of the vast multitude of the city. This is the story not […]