The former capital of British India, Calcutta (now Kolkata) was once in the minds of many foreigners synonymous with poverty and squalor. This is an outdated notion – the educated locals have long resented this one-dimensional view of their city that they regard as the intellectual and cultural capital of the nation. Certainly there’s still plenty of poverty here, as a walk past the babies and their parent/s sleeping on hessian bags under plastic sheeting slung up over the footpath and garbage piles startlingly show. But most of Calcutta is not like that. It’s a developing city with an increasingly modern skyline, home to a growing middle-class.The current-day capital of West Bengal state, Calcutta has a fine collection of British-era colonial buildings; perhaps the most grand is the memorial to Queen Victoria completed in 1921. We spent some time strolling in and around this huge white marble edifice, examining the historical information, photos and paintings inside. But the foul weather took its toll, extinguishing our enthusiasm to see other nearby colonial buildings. Instead we returned via the Calcutta subway to our hotel, sagging and soaking wet with sweat and waited until the evening before venturing out again. Weather doesn’t come much worse than 40 degrees C with 90% humidity.
Some of Calcutta’s facilities look to be frozen in a time warp and it's this that makes the city such a fascinating place for visitors. Firemen on their trucks cleared a path by energetically clanging by hand big bells mounted high on the engine. This was quite an achievement considering the cacophony of horn honking by the other vehicles, a large percentage of which are decades-old yellow Austin Ambassador Classic taxis. And Calcutta is the only place we’ve seen where the original style large-wheeled rickshaws pulled by wiry men on foot still ply their trade up and down the streets.
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