Calcutta, Where Time Stands Still, Or Does It?

Calcutta, or, as modern nomenclature would have it, Kolkata, is the city I was born in, and partially grew up in. Much has been written, said, debated, and portrayed in art forms when it comes to describing the famed cultural heritage of the city of joy. The first British capital of India has had so much to tell us about history that in so many ways, the city is still engulfed in a haze of the yesteryear. In short, it still smells of a place that refuses to move on.

As a Bengali who has lived elsewhere for most of her childhood as well as adult life, I was under the same impression when I moved back into the city in my late — thirties. I expected to see the familiar sights of a crowded Sunday fish market and hear the cacophony of bus conductors narrating all the bus stops standing (or half-balancing themselves on the feet of the bus-doors). And boy! Was I Right?

At the first glance, I thought I was. Kolkata has always been a symbol of all-things-old-and-precious. In my memory, it was a city where time stood still. And I knew I was right when the sound of a child playing Rabindrasangeet on a harmonium wafted in through my window when I woke up one afternoon after a siesta (yes, another characteristically Bengali thing, the afternoon siesta). The next day, as I was cooking, more familiar sounds greeted me. Songs from the ’80s and the ’90s Hindi and Bengali movies floated in so effortlessly as if the last 3 decades of life had never happened.

There was more. As I walked into grocery shops, the well-acquainted friendly conversations between the shopkeepers and the customers popped up. People here enquire about each other’s health, talk politics, discuss personal affairs, and most importantly, offer to help in any way they can. I felt warm, welcomed, and in my element.

Now, a section of readers must be thinking “All of this is fine, but what about development?”, and, “If time always stands still, how will we ever move forward?”, so on and so forth. While I admit that there have been slower developments in the city when compared to some other cities of the country, it is not stuck completely in the retro mode. Small developments are easy to ignore when you live in one place over several years, but such changes instantly catch the eye of someone who has returned after ages.

And when someone like me returns, what do they find? A seamless flow of the old into the new, an age where the new imbibes, respects, and learns from the old, an era where the old welcomes the new with open arms while planting its feet firmly on the ground, where the new is not obstructed and neither is the old discarded. That is what the returning pair of eyes see.

Let me take a few mundane examples to describe how the old and the new have blended in this city. As I said earlier, going to the grocery store here meant conversations. But if you need developments, you must make way for the new culture of online groceries delivered at your doorstep. As with other cities, this development has occurred here, too, but with a twist.

While in other places, the delivery personnel drop off the goods at your door and leave, here, in the city of joy, they stop for a minute for a quick conversation. No, they do not run late because of a three-second conversation, rather, the fact that they enquire about you puts a smile on your face and warms up your day. It can be very cold when everyone behaves one hundred percent like a machine, but in Kolkata, the human element never looks remotely close to perishing amid all the high-tech machinery.

Similar things are seen in matters of transport. Kolkata now has cab aggregators running shoulder-to-shoulder along with the classic yellow Ambassadors (yes, they still exist). With GPS and other mobile technologies, modern cab drivers do not need to talk to you, the passenger. They only have to look at the live map, pick you up, and drop you at the locations pointed there.

And this is exactly what cab drivers do in other cities. But in Kolkata, the average modern cab driver will always greet you with a “Kothay Jaben” (where do you want to go)?” even where the map clearly shows your destination. Why do they do that? Do they not know how to read the map? Of course, they do. But the three-second exchange of words with you breaks the monotony of his modern-day robotic life, and yours too. Joy well spread.

Developments continue to be seen in other spheres, too. As a place that was not known for its ease of doing business, Kolkata has, in recent years, seen a multitude of start-ups being incubated in its heart.

One such startup is an app-based driver service, which is a dire need of the hour considering the city’s growing traffic. Another new venture is a non-profit organization that delivers organic food to your doorstep, straight from the farmers in the interiors of Bengal.

So far, even after returning from one of the so-called “most developed” cities of India, I have not found anything “modern” or “in-trend that is not available in Kolkata. Maybe sometimes these advancements are not advertised well enough, and other times they simply get sidelined because the older culture takes priority, but if you look for it, you are most likely to find development nurtured in the very laps of those age-old cultures.

There was a saying in Kolkata when I was a child, “Kolkatay poisha felle baagher dudh o pawa jay”, which means, if you can spend the money, you are sure to find even tiger’s milk in Kolkata. As I come back here, in my birthplace, in the hope of settling down once more, I am not exactly looking to find tiger’s milk. But I do know, that while on one hand, I can still walk out of a local grocery store with a packet made of newspapers, full of puffed rice made locally, on the other hand, I can get branded, exotic cocoa powder delivered straight to my doorstep.

And so, today, as I bring out my father’s old harmonium, dust it clean, and try to play a few Rabindrasangeets that my sire used to sing, I simultaneously relish producing the bass notes on my “purchased at a posh music store in a developed city” keyboard. With the right notes, blend in the old and the new music, the old and the new people, the old and the new conversations, and the old and are new emotions of joy, all thanks to the true nature of my beloved birth city.