Kolkata Kwickie

My efforts to keep "up to date" with this blog (as if I have some obligation to be) are being thwarted by a diabolical combination of constant travel, short business hours, an electricity crisis keeping half the country at only 55% of its required power supply, and illness. I've managed to put well over a thousand kilometers behind me in the time it took to go from being bored in Calcutta to being able to write this short post informing you that I was bored in Calcutta.

Kolkata, as the city is now known (with much more legitimate basis than the renaming of Mumbai) conjures up images of a massive warren of the most crippling poverty with one-legged orphans fighting squirrels for biscuit crumbs underneath moving trains. Let me tell you it is not that bad. Sure, there is a lot of poverty. It's a huge Indian city in the middle of the very poor state of West Bengal, but you have to actually go perversely out of your way to see its more renowned forms of squalor. There are apparently people who are disappointed by the surprising pleasantness of Kolkata and go way over to the infamous blocks where poor people have constructed burrow-homes in rubbish heaps and the like. I passed up the oppurtunity, thank you very much. The heart of Kolkata is a busy and relatively well-ordered business center with large parks, colonial buildings, and government offices, but a distinct lack of families dying in the streets. You do however see a lot of "tana rickshaws", which are like light two-wheeled passenger horse carts with a long metal handle, except you replace the horse with a barefooted homeless man. I opted to take the Metro.

The thing about Kolkata is that it is at its heart still a rather British city and the British were, let's face it, kind of boring. You are warmly invited to stroll downtown and observe old buildings, to discover that a 19th-century insurance company headquarters looks like something that should be an insurance company headquarters. The one exception is the Victoria Memorial, which must be by far the coolest thing the British ever built in their empire. It's basically a massive pile of gleaming white, domed, collonaded, and porticoed European pomp with slight Orientalist pretensions and fronted by a statue of Queen Victoria slumped in her chair like she'd just eaten an entire gallon of English porridge. It's definitely worth a look.

The Victoria Memorial is one of the few things in Kolkata that hasn't been renamed since independence. It's not a street or a park or a building that just so happened to be named after the queen. It is quite unavoidably a gigantic memorial to the late "Empress of India". Renaming it would be as absurd as deciding to try and cover up the Taj Mahal being a Muslim tomb. Any tourist guide will however happily tell you of some of the more amusing re-namings. The Communist state government is surprisingly comical for a group of ineffectual, machine-like Party men. A particular favorite is that the street on which the US consulate sits is now called Ho Chi Minh Road. The best of all is the re-naming of the city-center Dalhousie square, named for a top official of the British Raj, which is now called BBD Bagh. B, B, and D are the initials of none other than three Bengali radicals who attempted to assassinate to aforementioned Lord Dalhousie. If I were permitted to walk into the state Secretariat with its now delightfully ironic rooftop statue to a Roman goddess of Commerce, I would find as many Communist ministers as I could and exchange high-fives (and perhaps suggest they should now attend to, I don't know, reducing poverty maybe?)

I also went to India's foremost Kali temple. Kali, as you may recall, is basically a scary, half-naked, black-skinned ice bitch who wears decapitated heads as a necklace and severed limbs as a skirt while she drools blood over her madly extended tongue. Kali is basically a cross between Durga, Satan, and Gene Simmons. The temple itself is not all that grand but it is very busy, and is known for the intensity of its devotion to animal sacrifices. Once I found my way in to the courtyard I wrinkled my nose at the smell and started to swat away flies. I realized I was standing about two feet from a shin-high pile of entrails. I took a moment to stare as the priests added organs to what I deduced were the remains of multiple animals, and while my guard was down I got...bhramined.

Getting "Brahmined" is an irritating situation that happens in temples that receive foreign visitors with any regularity. One moment you're distracted looking at a statue or a pile of guts, and the next thing you know some bhrahmin has shoved half a pound of flowers in your unexpecting hands, smeared paint on your face and is reassuring you that the offerings only cost 20 rupees. This is of course before you are invited to sign a "charity ledger" where "tourists" (with about four different kinds of handwriting) have all donated large sums of money because they apparently care quite deeply about the upkeep of Kali temples. And that is before you are asked to pay the priest for his services of following you around, periodically grabbing you, and entreating you to throw a bundle of flowers at a Kali idol that is a bizarre fat black head with three red eyes and a two-foot metal tongue. Not only will the brahmin demand too much money for his "help", he may also attempt to get you to give money for the services of various acolytes, whom you may look at with a squint and conclude that not only did they do nothing to assist you but you have also never even seen them before. I hate clergy. And after I squabble and make unflattering comparisons involving the moral character of priests and of the sacrificed goats, it seems the clergy hates me.

Anyways, I had spent enough time in Kolkata to decide it hardly interested me and I caught a night train northwards. Just as I was falling asleep I was roused by a jab in the ribs, and I looked down to see a silky-haired man in a dress saying "Some money, handsome brother?" WILL IT NEVER END??? I need to sleep. I'll go to Nepal.