Where nobody gives up

Rickshaw-puller & shopping
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Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C., USA. He visited Calcutta last year. His article on the city, "Oh! Kolkata!" has been published in The Atlantic.

Kaplan writes:

"...Calcutta is, frankly, obscene. ... Calcutta is an eccentric jumble, of which poverty is but the outer layer. ... Despite the distracting horror of pavement life, the real story of Calcutta is its transformation into a global city... For all Calcutta’s aspirations to become a global city, its history suggests that the transition won’t be altogether peaceful. ... "

Read the article here.

Photo: Atul Loke.

Sign of the times

See the picture. Did you get it?

Its supposed to be "Road No Entry" stupid!

Quite clearly, just like in the Kalahari desert, human ingenuity in Calcutta surpasses imagination.

Thanks to Jyoti Basu's elimination of English teaching from schools as well as the continuing protection of millions from the pernicious effects of education, it seems English has transformed into a kind of pidgin-patois here.

Full basis as we can see for Calcutta's bid to be a World City of Literature! But with a poet-playwright Chief Minister, isn't that simply in the fitness of things?