Calcutta Diary

An estimated 1,00,000 "women" in Kolkata alone,
40 per cent said to be below 18 years.
India is said to have about 4,00,000 children into it.
Prostitution - a profession as old as the humanity itself.
With the need for younger sex workers alarmingly high,
the girl child has become a prey of sexual abuse.

Most of these children live in brothels with their mothers.
They are sent to sleep on the streets at night,
lest they disturb the mother's business.
Infants, who cannot be kept out at night,
sleep below the bed on which the mother --
has to submit to her customers' demands.
To stop the child from crying, it is often drugged!!
It’s part and parcel of the business here, it’s fondly called life

A haste view from one of the red light lines near Kalighat temple

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The character of Calcutta has often been allied with the goddess
who gave the city its name: Kali,
The black divinity of death and destruction.
The deathly and violent connotations of Kali are extended to the city,
Often depicted as a 'metropolitan nightmare',
a place often identified with overpopulation,
poverty, political riots and sickness.
Man and beast sharing the meat, after a sacrifice..
A snap from the Kalighat temple.

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Howrah Bridge, popularly known as Rabindra Setu
spans over river Hooghly
Carrying a traffic of around 60,000 vehicles
and innumerable pedestrians daily,
this marvelous engineering work by the British
is enumerated amongst the busiest cantilever bridge in the World.

The bridge links the metropolitan city of Kolkata and Howrah
and in fact the most sentimental landmark
as well as a vital identity of the colonial city.

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It is a classic image of Kolkata:
scrawny, spindly-legged men,
often in advanced middle-age and barefoot,
pulling passengers through the streets in rickshaws.
Kolkata is the last major city in the world
where hand-pulled rickshaws carry passengers.
China, where the rickshaw was invented,
outlawed the “bourgouis and exploitative” practice in 1949,
during the early days of the Cultural Revolution

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" A thousand favours from a maund she drew
Of amber, crystal, and of beaded jet,
Which one by one she in a river threw,
Upon whose weeping margent she was set;
Like usury, applying wet to wet,
Or monarch's hands that let not bounty fall
Where want cries some, but where excess begs all"
--Shakespeare--
A snap from a ghat near Dakshineshwar temple.

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The staple diet of the Bengalis is rice and fish.
A true Bengali considers a meal incomplete without fish.
Even the Brahmins of Bengal eat fish
and no celebration is complete without it.
Bengali cuisine does not start and end with fish,
though it forms a large part of the Bengla food habits.

Calcutta’s markets are flooded at any time
with all sizes and shapes of fishes
Carp, salmon, hilsa, bhekti, rui, magur, prawns and koi.
For the archetypal Bengali,
food is the most important aspect of daily life
and it's discussed and debated about
as passionately as leftist ideologies and Tagore

A road side fish stall in Culcutta, a view near Hotel Wellesley.

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The yellow beauties that rule the roads..
the brand 'ambassadors' of Calcutta..
a view from Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road.

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Waiting for the next 'savari'...

a scene near Kalighat Temple.

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