Skip to main content

Remembering Kolkata

Reading A Place Within and its fascinating to see India come alive in the author's voice. He says this of Kolkata, my home-town:

Of course there is a brilliance here, compared to the simple career-mindedness that I’ve seen elsewhere. These people here are not merely climbers, with wives or families to answer to, status to aspire to. They do not yearn for trips abroad. They are well informed, up-to-date not only on the news but also on global events and history; and they know literature. This is Calcutta. They can quote freely from Bengali writings (as well as Derrida and Foucault), and unlike Indians elsewhere lapse easily into the mother tongue in front of a non-speaker even as they apologize for this; they relish the language, love it, so it’s easy to understand, excuse the lapse. And there is a genuine sympathy for the oppressed: after all, there exists a caste system, and the multitudes are poor beyond imagination.

This is the Kolkata I met when I first came there to work a couple of years out of college. I have lived and traveled many other parts of India - until then Kolkata was a place I visited sometimes to meet the grandparents. Working there was an eye-opening experience for me then and the impressions I formed remain with me to this day. I am fortunate that I can stay with the romance and nostalgia of those long ago days, unblemished by the struggle and strife of everyday living that my parents and relatives report. I have the luxury of reminiscing about the smart, talented, artistic, quirky and charming people I got to know during that time, how great it felt to soak in that atmosphere as a young person who had a lot of growing up left to do. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more