Proud of DIDI

Chennai papers were full of Mamata Didi yesterday. 'Duronto' is coming to town... the non stop super fast from Chennai to Delhi. Then there is the "gift" of Didi to Chennai women- all women trains to ply intra city. Then there was the instance of her refusal to move in a bungalow in Delhi and decisionto stay back in the apartment which was originally provided her. Now Mamata Banerjee is being touted as the new face of the Congress frugality brigade. The minister to walks the talk.
Kolkata women had the benefit of Didi's thoughtfulness long back, her last tenure as railway minister. And now we are seeing women all over the country hailing these moves. The need is there... Chennai just came out with the 'Pink Cabs'... all women service cabs for women and children. No more fear when we need to travel alone at 2 am to catch the 4 am flight.
Seeing Didi's face flooding the papers, suddenly seemed not so different from Kolkata papers. And I should say... for once I am proud I voted foryou, Didi.

Generation Me - Learn to Parent your Parents

People in Shanghai can now have two kids. China till a few years back, just stopped short of executing parents for flouting their "one couple- one child" norm. And now this? It seems that the population of China is ageing very fast. "438 Million people in China will be 60 and older by 2050, leaving just 1.6 working age adults for each elder." says Newsweek.

We with our "Hum do, humare do" policy, which was not that strictly followed anyway, would turn out little better. But from my absolute lay persons view, consider this. All my friends are either alone, or have a single sibling. Our parents come from the great Indian middle class of the 60-s to 80-s. They were educated, politically motivated and ambitious about themselves and their children. Most were still single income households. The middle classes decided to stop after their first two. The next class didnt quite. Hence we still see lesser privileged cousins who have 4 or more siblings around.

With time its gone worse. To provide the best for their children many have stuck to their only child. By then we have come into the "upper middle class" strata. We own a house, a car, and gadgets. SEC (socio economic) class A. We are shrinking at a much greater rate than other SECs.

The first to relise it is the doctors of government hospitals. My sister, who is a gyenecologist, have assisted in the births of more than 4 children from one particular woman in the last 6 years. Rest assured, she is not the only one, nor is my sister the only doctor experiencing this.

Another study, another country. USA- "According to futurist Andrew Zolli people born after 1975 could end up taking care of their mothers longer than their mothers took care of them" (newsweek) Women of our mothers generation are likely to live 18 years into their retirement, a new record! Men follow right behind, though. And USA hit with financial woes, is seeing a new trend of having 3 generations or more under one roof.

We Indians have been there done that long enough to know that it is possible to live that way if there is mutual respect. The kids get company, the grandparents get mental peace and joy, and care in their own house, and that goes on to create a more stable society.

The age of the world is changing. And how!

We are all coming to town

Getting used to life in Chennai is so difficult when I think of what I am missing. Another BANDH!!! Yoo hoo! Kolkata knows how to enjoy its bandh days.
This morning I had a fight with my husband about the "Kolkata attitude". He has to say that Kolkatans dont have any aggressiveness. They will stand in line in all their wide eyed stupidity while the world goes by into the entrance. (BTW, I thought that was the Lucknowi "pehle aap" theory.) I replied- do you know where most freedom fighters on our country came from? West Bengal, maaan!
Revoltution is in our blood. "Bhenge dao, guriye dao"... just look at the Maoists.
We are the Argumentative Bengali who can also follow a call to war, are we not? Case in point, Netaji! We are the born non conformists. Whatever the rule says, we would do the opposite. We love our food, and our adda, we love our Victoria Memorial, and we love to hate Victoria and all the gora-s who helped build it. We still cry buckets of tears for our partition, and we still shout ourselves hoarse at the ghoti-bangal debates.
What Kolkata Attitude!!! OK we love our bandh afternoon naps, and we love to do nothing but talk politics and football all day, but pack us into an overcrowded sweaty bus on the way to work and see how our fighting instincts blossom and bloom. Put us in line for a train ticket and watch if anyone wants to come in between. We can stand for our rights just as much as the next non Kolkatan can, so help me God!
And Im coming back to Cal for my much awaited visit. Short one this time but cant wait to have phuchka and Ma-yer haater luchi - aalur dom again!!!

Hurricane Aila Kolkata ala re

25th May 2009
Started with rain. Hurricane Aila about to lash the city in 24 hours the papers screamed. And Aila just took 4 hours to come to town. And I have not seen anything like this before. An experience on Byepass road just a few days back forced me to stay indoors out of, Im not ashamed to say, fear. (I was stuck just a week back during a Norwester on the byepass.)
I watched the cyclone hit from the second floor verandah with a baby bulbul and a very drenched crow for company, and I should say, it was one of the most fear inducing experiences I have had. Especially that huge sky-kissing coconut tree I could see in the distance, it was like some wild haired hag on a crazed tandav dance. I didnt think it would survive the storm. It did. Coconut trees usually do. The huge flowering champa tree next door, however, didnt make it. We had some casualties in a few mangoes, a jackfruit which fell and broke the asbestos roofing of the shed, and leaf strewn lawn, and the tank cover that blew away.
The actual storm started at about 11 am and lasted well into the afternoon. Then about 3.30 pm a red alert was sounded. The main storm with winds at 100 kmph was about to hit after 4 pm. Offices cleared out in a jiffy. Phone calls to and fro to everyone one knew to tell them what people already had heard. STAY INDOORS.
That big one didnt hit. News said its crashed on Haldia, some say Orissa coast. But it spared us, if it still can be termed sparing. After a couple of cases of electrocution on the roads, due to fallen lamp posts, the power was switched off through this part of the city, Tollygunj. Our power went at about 2 pm.
The latest- 80 trees down, thats the last count some minutes back. Just 10 on Harish Mukherjee Road. Most roads still closed to traffic. 9 dead in the city, many from trees falling on cars and autos. The whole city ravaged. Byepass, my favourite road, clogged.
Only now at 7.30 pm the power has been resumed. The worst, as they say, is over. The rain continues and is bound to for the next two days, says the MET dept. Thats ok. We need some rain. And with the roads no longer getting water logged, the rain is welcome.
Not Aila.

Odyssey Bookstore sutting shop?

In just more than a year, the bookstore chain Odyssey, is all set to shut shop. The location of the store is Anwar Shah Road, opposite Navina Cinema Hall. The books/cds/toys went on sale some 6 months back and seeing that the sale never lifted, I was wondering whats wrong. Seems they cannot sustain the business model.
South Calcutta has an Oxford Bookstore near Deshapriya Park, a Starmark at South City Mall, and a Crossword inside Shoppers Stop at the same mall. Gariahat footpaths are a booklovers haunt with plenty of second hand book/magazine stalls. Starmark at least seems to be doing whopping good business, but that may be due to the sheer strength of location. All the head honchos of the bookstore chains agree that location is of prime importance. Maybe Odyssey should have been inside South City mall, it would have given good competition to Starmark. Or a location like Park Street would ensure footfall and spending customers.
The biggest sadness is this is one shop where the employees and custpmer service was really impeccable. I used to take my 2 year old child, have been doing so since the shop opened, and not once did I have a problem with her pulling things down or sitting in toy cars. The shop floor assistants would happily take care of her and even give her rounds on the toys she loved best. I have to say Ive bought more than enough books after the sale came on. I will miss Odyssey.

An Article on Kolkata in New York Times by Somini Sengupta

This is a New York Times article link a friend sent me.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/travel/03calcutta.html?pagewanted=1&ref=travel

Here is what my friend Esha, who is herself a regular contributor to websites and journals, had to say about it:

"It looks like the NY Times article is from a different era. None of the new developments have been mentioned. The clubs and restaurants mentioned are from our grandfathers' times. In the list of hotels - ITC Sonar, Hyatt, HHI and Taj Bengal are missing. From the past, Netaji has been misrepresented and Ray not even given a mention. The photographs are misleading to say the least. What else can you expect when she visited brothels and post offices instead of Science City or South City?

There many many more things in the article which irked me but I don't think my comment or the comments of like-minded people made any difference. Maybe you know people in the Indian media who can set this wrong right or something."

I dont know anyone in the media but if anyone who is reading this does, then its up to you to take that step. Here is my take. This article was published on 3rd May of 2009. Reading through it I had to come back and recheck the date, or the year, for it seems to be written ten years back. When did Ms Sengupta last set foot in Kolkata? Probably then. Hand pulled rickshaws, beggars on Kalighat streets, abject and acute poverty, Black-White-Grey areas, people who dont order in restaurants, Coffee House waiters who complain and stay glum, are these not so last century? Not having two square meals in Kolkata?? I agree poverty is still a pressing problem, especially in the outskirts and villages in West Bengal, but really???

The hammer and sickle is also so last generation now Ms Sengupta. Now you will see DIDI's face screaming at you from posters everywhere. This is a city now where the hammer and sickle is somehow trying to keep its handle-hold. If it will succeed is still to be seen, after the 13th May elections. And streets are marked all right. You just need to keep your eyes open. The streets are as marked as any other city in India. We are not comparing to New York again, are we?

Just in the last few years so much change has happened in this city, it is still weird that people are stuck to the college street- kalighat temple- tram ride mode. My friends and colleagues visited in 2007. Yes there were the tram rides and college street, coffee house, my alma mater, Presidency College, these are fixtures. But we also went to the bustling energy of New Market, the tram ride to Gariahat to see one of the cheapest and largest street markets of the world probably. (BTW I had been a regular at Coffee House at one time, and the waiters are not GLUM, they are just OLD and SLOW. They have been used to generations of revolutionaries, thinkers and gossipers spending hour after lazy hour in the establishment. They LIKE that!!! And also, the same building houses Rupa publishers, Chakravarty and Chatterjee publishers, for books at great discounts, and some pretty amazing finds, like the old old man who used to live in a room full of type writers and papers. Oh, and Coffee House has been revamped just last month into a new and improved...)

We went to the Ghats. As a tourist in Kolkata how can you not. You have to take a launch ride or at least convince a boatman for an hours trip on the river. Its the loveliest thing I have done in the city. The mighty Ganges, the two massive (and worlds busiest) bridges on both sides of you... Kolkata and stuck in time??? A future time maybe.

Sengupta claims women were kept in purdah and her grandmother studied till the age of 13. My grandmother is a double MA (Hindi and English), her sister is a PhD in Sanskrit. My grandma is 82. There are two sides to every coin. Doctors, lawyers, even pilots, women in Bengal have been more progressive than her counterparts in the rest of the country. Every girl (and every boy, for that matter) is trained in one form of art at least. You will find singers and dancers and artists in every home here. Education is given a level of importance which is sometimes irritating, in the way parents will goad their children for studying. But even here attitudes are changing. You do not have to be an engineer or a doctor any more. You could be a fashion designer or an actor... Sabyasachi, the Kolkata designer making waves around the world today, is the apple of every Bong mothers eye.

The piece on Netaji by Sengupta, I am reproducing here:

Calcutta has another guerrilla hero: Subhas Chandra Bose, who broke away from Gandhi’s nonviolent movement to raise an army against the British. The central narrative of his erstwhile family mansion on Elgin Road, now a museum of Bose memorabilia, is his “great escape” from house arrest. Red footsteps on the balcony mark how he tiptoed out on a January night in 1941. The gray Wanderer in which he was driven away sits in the driveway. In one gallery is an extraordinary collection of photographs, including Netaji — “respected leader” as he is known — shaking hands with Hitler in 1942; apparently, he took help where he could get it.

Good she wrote this in a New York paper. :))

Where to eat: I have not been to as many eateries in my city as I would like to but limiting the list to 3 is downright insulting. :) Even I could do better than that. One of my posts would be dedicated to eateries in Kolkata, promise. Send me your fav food place list to payal@spearhead.co.in.

SENGUPTA, the author of the discussed article is The New York Times bureau chief in India.

Kolkata is a mixture of Kalighat temple and Sector V. It is a combination of Metro Railway and rickety buses whose tyre-bursts kill people. There is a Science City and there are the tanneries. There is a bye pass road, and there are the narrow gullies of North Kolkata. There is Pizza Hut and Anadir Cabin Mughlai Paratha.

Honey, I could just go on and on. But whats the use. For people like me, it is nostalgia which paints the city in rainbow hues. For an outsider, Netaji and Tagore and sandesh with "truffle-like injection of palm syrup", is all there is to the city maybe. Like all outsiders of yore, they still revel in the pictures of ragpickers and Howrah Bridge, and refuse to see the living breathing city, like any other city and yet so unlike, where millions go to work (as rickshaw pullers as well as software engineers) in the morning and get back to homes and families to join the table at dinner.

Cross Connection- new Bengali movie

Heard a new song on radio- Tumi Nei, sung by Anjan Dutta, music by his son Neel Dutt. The song is good, but I cant post it here, there is no online version. The music release has happened though and the cd would probably be available in the market.
The song was very sweet, nostalgic, emotional. At first I thought it was composed by Anjan Dutta himself because it sounds just like any of his songs. Neel has taken after his dad in the music chords. :)
Dont miss it when it comes out on you tube.

Crime Rate, Books, Kolkata and Amartya Sen

... not necessarily in that order.

Background- The London Bookfair 2009, where the market focus this year is India. Speakers have included Amartya Sen, Vikram Seth, Sunil Gangyopadhyay, Anita Nair, Dalrymple, Prasoon Joshi, among a host of other Indian writers in English and vernacular languages.






Amartya Sen who took the podium on the first day, 20th April went on to link crime rate and love for books. He commented that Kolkata has "the lowest crime rates in the world due to the civilising effect of books", reported The Telegraph.



Excerpts from his speech:

• “Does the culture of books influence the life of the city in any profound way?”
• “To consider one remarkable feature, Calcutta has, by a long margin, the lowest crime rate in the world, including the incidence of homicide and murder. While the number of murders per hundred thousand people per year varies between 2 and 10 per year in many cities in Europe and America, and between 15 and 50 per year in many cities in Africa and Latin America, the homicide rate in impoverished Calcutta is only 0.3 per cent — a fraction of the rate in any other city in the world.”
• “Indian cities generally have low murder rates, around 2.7 on the average (rather like London but much lower than American cities like New York or Chicago), but Calcutta in particular beats them all — even the famously peaceful towns of Singapore and Hong Kong — in terms of the lowness of homicide rates.”
• “Does the peculiar love of books and culture, and here I would add Calcutta’s fondness for theatre, too (often produced at very low cost), have a role here? I don’t really know, and there is no rigorous work on this that has properly tested any of the possible hypotheses.”
• “It is abundantly clear that the standard explanation of crime in terms only of economic poverty does not tell us much about the incidence and causation of violent crime, including homicide. There is certainly some research to be done here.”

Like all Kolkatans he also has his heart strings tied with College Street and said that these stalls teeming with books have influenced many a brilliant mind including Satyajit Ray and even himself.

• “It was in one of the College Street bookshops, called Dasgupta’s, that my friend Sukhamoy Chakravarty found at the end of 1951 a copy of a recent book by a brilliant economist Kenneth Arrow, which would radically influence my direction of work. I often wondered whether my life would have gone very differently had my friend, Sukhamoy, not been such a book hound.”
  
  

Kolkata is going the New York way

Yeah right...

I only mean with the city wide black out. April 19, Sunday evening will go down in history as the hottest April 19th ever... 41 degrees, was 5 above normal- reported one daily, 13 above- reported another. And just when Kolkatans were snuggling into their comfy air conditioned 24 degree living rooms to watch a bit of IPL on TV, BOOM... yeah, literally, BOOM went the lights, fans, AC-s, TV-s all over the city... and well, the street lights and traffic signals and hospitals and metro railway and airports... you name it.
Pic from The Telegraph of Park Street during the black out.

Of course, Kolkata Knight Riders lost their inaugaral match. But thank god no one was watching TV to see our Hero (seen here in action yesterday) make 1 run. Take his captaincy away, and the Expert Boria Mazumder, (who was my senior in Presidency btw, who knew one day I would be quoting him), knows something about the stinking (pun not intended) atmosphere of the dressing room in lovely South Africa.

Anyway, unable to stay in the house we decided to take to the streets in my comfy ac car, it has a music system also, godbless. Seems like every one had the same bright idea. We were bored sick of South City Mall, that being 5 minutes drive from home, so we decided to make a picnic of it and drove all the way to Mani Square. And God, was that a bad idea. Their parking is not well equipped to hadle a sudden surge of cars, it was mayhem right at the entrance. Inside, the mall kept plunging into darkness every fifteen minutes, which lasted 5 seconds in the shopping area but in the over crowded food court, we were at one time sitting in near pitch darkness for 15 minutes or more.

The food court itself was in the throes of the worst kind of chaos. No one knew the meaning of a queue. Once you manage your coupon, its a mad rush of loudest-shout-first-serve. Or longest-arm-first-serve. Im just five feet two, my arms arent that long, but hell, my voice is pretty darn loud, is what I found out yesterday!!!

One word of caution for people carrying babies or toddlers. Unlike South City, this mall is not todddler friendly. The drops are not totally covered. There is half a foot gap between floor edge an the glass railing, any tiny foot could get stuck there. If you are parking on the upper floors and you want to take a pram through the fourth floor entrance, then its a hassle with a largish step over which you have to carry your baby's pram by hand.

Mani Square- Food Court

As food courts go, this one is worth a visit. Allegdly with 25000 sq ft, situated at the top floor of the mall, the seats are clean and still new. The seating is interesting with individual tables or tables surrounding pillars. The food range is more or less fine, not as extensive as the one in South City mall, but will do. One draw is my personal favs, SubWay, Crepe Station, and the juice bar. There is a yummy cake shop but its so far down the line that diet conscious people will always have second thoughts once you reach there. Bad positioning. Thali-s are good.

Its a good option when you are looking for a quick bite before a movie or a visit to the game zone. The multiplex is right there, on the same floor. Makes things easier. Once you are there and have time and money of course the other restaurants will beckon. But we quite enjoyed ourselves having lunch there.

Pocket Pinch- One plate food with a juice and a pastry/dessert will cost about Rs 150- 180 per head.
Service - Self service of course, but even then, some shops are a little slower than the rest in the preparation.

Restaurant- Machaan, Mani Square Mall

Finally made it to the Mani Square Restaurants and food court. Let me talk of Machaan first. One of the most interesting restaurants I have visited recently.
The entrance itself piques interest, it has a tribal mannequin complete with spear and gear... and once you enter, wow, its a jungle in there. Literally...

Atmo- The place is darkish, trees, leaves, over hangings everywhere the eye turns. Once the eye gets used to the light, you see things, oh really really. An elephant just by the entrance, a giraffe at yonder corner, which even calls (! never heard a giraffe call before, so cant vouch for authenticity) and moves its long neck, a monkey hanging... sorry... swinging from the branch there, birds of all feathers, including a woodpecker which pecks (not fast enough, that I can vouch for, Ive heard wood peckers peck!!!), an anaconda, is it, on that side? Holy moley... its an artificial zoo, the only real thing about which is the weaver bird nests, hanging in profusion. There are even plastic parrots everywhere.

The service is attentive and quick. The food is good, nothing extraordinary. My watermelon juice was good, we did not have any mock tails. The bill comes to around 500 odd rupees per head with a starter and a main course, and without dessert.

Verdict? Good for a visit with kids, it will give them a lot to talk about. The surprise factor works for it, but after that they got to improve the food and drinks, and reduce the prices a bit, to work in the recession market.