Reflections VIII - India March 21, 2008
by Sandra Price
Today is the beginning of the holiday here in France for Paques or Easter. Switzerland allots four days to the event including vendredi saint (Holy Friday); France has three days starting with Saturday, which makes for some confusion. Since CERN is in Switzerland, we had planned to take the four days to do a little department seaching (76 down, 17 to go) by driving to the south of France over near Spain only to awaken this morning to our first real winter storm. It is snowing as I speak and even the snow plow had to take a second run to get up our hill. So I guess I’ll finally get some Reflections out beginning with our experiences over Christmas in Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, India.
Trip to India
In an email saying that he’d gotten his shots for our family trip to India, Jeff wrote that “going to India is an extreme sport.” And indeed it is. Getting to Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) took us an extra 36 hours – technical problems led to the cancellation of one flight one day and then fog the next day, compounded by Air India’s ineptitude at problem-solving, left us flying not directly to Kolkata but via Mumbai, something we’d worked hard to avoid. Two lessons learned – it’s better to fly an airline that has a hub at your airport (Air India only flies a few planes into and out of Heathrow) and Jet Airways, a domestic Indian flyer, is a real airline even if all the female employees have dark hair pulled into a bun.
The people from the guest house where we were staying kindly picked us up, after
waiting quite a while. (Not one of our flights on the trip was on time.)
Once in Kolkata we resurrected or acquired skills for the sport of living in Kolkata –
As you can guess, being in Kolkata is intense with people everywhere walking or selling something along the sidewalk or jumping off trams and buses or living on the street. Jeff likened it to a beehive or anthill streaming with constant activity. And there is a constant background of horns beeping from drivers as well as bad air pollution this time of year. Riding in a taxi at night reminded me of black and white movies from the 50’s set in London during a killer fog. Almost all the plants along the street and in parks were covered with a layer of dust. I wondered how they survived. Finding the best time to visit Kolkata involves balancing temperature, rainfall, malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and air pollution. The pollution in December is the result of no rain, thousands of coal and wood fires from street-side vendors and street-sweepers, and many older cars and buses with no pollution control. Expats we met voted for December for the pleasant temperatures and fewer mosquitoes, especially when they had to protect small children.
Some background - Kolkata is the only big city in the northeast of India and is a magnet for people. The population is somewhere between 13 and 21 million people who speak a multitude of languages but primarily Bengali and Hindi and English. Some people are from nearby poorer states like Orissa and Bihar or from the neighboring Bengali-speaking country of Bangladesh but there are also Punjabi and Gujurati people from the west of India. Estimates are that one-third of the population lives in registered and unregistered slums, some of which are called “bustees.”
The city, organized from three small villages by the British of the British East India Company and used later by the British government as the capital until 1912, still has some buildings and institutions from that era. Since 1912 they have been used by successive governments for offices, even by the current Communists.
Physically Kolkata is a city that has “potential.” Our professional guide, recommended by friends, explained why. There has been rent control so for years landlords, who are responsible for the outsides of buildings, could justifiably claim that they could not afford to maintain the buildings. They can now raise rents by some percentage but they still claim that they are not making enough. The few buildings that have been painted show how handsome the city could be. One change has been made to improve the look of the city – the cows have been relocated to the countryside.
Some more paint on the roads might also help with the problem of traffic – there are more cars, trucks, buses, trams, taxis, and motorized and human powered pedicabs and rickshaws than even the broad avenues can handle so driving there is a skill we didn’t even contemplating learning. Lanes are often unmarked so the number of lanes varies – sometimes the vehicles were three abreast, sometimes four. As we rode in taxis in the sea of vehicles that flow in the streets and byways of Kolkata, we rated our drivers (inversely) by how often they used their horns. Horns are beeped constantly, not in anger but to alert other drivers and pedestrians to the location of the beeping vehicle. But we saw that traffic generally moves - by rules everyone seems to know. We surmised that a Boston cabbie, the city with the most aggressive drivers we know, would last about a minute and a half in Kolkata. We also observed that drivers turned their engines off for longer lights or traffic jams and that about half the cabs did not have side rear view mirrors because of the danger of their being clipped off. Forget about seat belts and seat
extensions to protect against whip-lash. Paint did appear on the back of buses with signs of “India is great” since last year was the fiftieth anniversary of independence.
Kolkata is not set up as a tourist-destination city. For example, the government changed many street names to honor local heroes and freedom fighters but did not create a consistent and clear system of signage with old and new names so that you’d know where you were. We had a useful list from the internet of all the changes and there are some helpful street signs with the old names as well as the new but not consistently placed where we could find them. A good map was essential. One guide book warned that there were no good maps of Kolkata but Google Earth and the like seem to have changed that. One disclaimer here – we never got to the city or state tourist offices which guide books say are helpful. It is a city with a low crime rate and we felt safe walking around with the usual precautions against pickpockets.
As for creature comforts, there are public urinals on the street for men which afford a small measure of privacy if a noisome environment; but I found that I had to plan carefully for my needs. A Marks and Spenser shopping mall, which had guards at the doors, was my salvation one day. But even France, which is the most visited country in the world, struggles with the public toilet problem. Most mairies (town halls) have them but they are often not very pleasant places to visit. (There are “villages etape” in some regions of France which are designed as rest stops for tourists. They promise a hotel, a restaurant, and toilets open 24/7.) McDonald’s has been a godsend from time to time
But what did we do in Kolkata? First we had the advantage of staying in a guesthouse in the south of the city near a landmark every cabbie knew. The people there were so helpful and the administrator even invited us to dinner since we know her nephew for whom she manages the house. We got to see the intriguing art work of our friend’s father and a sense of the cultural life of Kolkata. In our location we were not hounded by beggars and touts. We could walk to the metro although we soon found taxis more convenient since they were ubiquitous and cheap by our standards. We also had people we knew in Kolkata which let us experience other aspects of the city.
In Kolkata
Kalighat Temple is dedicated to Kali, a consort of Shiva, with an unbelievably complex history. The temple was totally crowded with long lines waiting to get in. We did learn that it feeds the homeless using the goats and occasional ox that are sacrificed on the site. It seems to be the only temple that still carries out such sacrifices. Jeff found the place totally off-putting. There were a lot of touts in the area. Not a pleasant experience. And the water people bathed in before going to the temple was not clean.
Victoria Memorial was Lord Curzon’s early in the 20th century British answer to the Taj Mahal which he had built using marble from the same quarry as the stones for the Taj. As with most museums we saw it as very old-fashioned except for a new historical section. The grounds were lovely and filled with people enjoying the open space.
The Cathedral is Anglican. Sorry, no pictures could be taken but it has an
unusual design being mostly rectangular and front was wide and open. It was full of tourists and I wondered who they were – only 2% of Indians are Christians and most of them live in the south of India. What sense were they making of the place?
The Indian Museum has some treasures but the items I really wanted to see were in a
section being renovated. The section on the tribal peoples of India
is being up-dated but the current data comes from 1961. I was intrigued by a model of a Parsi burial site where they would put bodies to decompose outside. It was very carefully and thoughtfully designed. I hope when the museum remodels it will put the guest shop near the entrance so that people can buy something before surrendering their purses and backpacks. Perhaps France could send foreign aid in the form of museum people from here who obviously know how to put one together with even the tiniest local museums being artfully done.
(Starred items were part of a guided tour)
Mother Teresa’s* is as sparse as one would imagine. There were some nuns
worshipping in the chapel and our guide pointed out a small statue
of Mother Teresa seated on the floor in the back making up a part
of the congregation as she did when she was alive. References to her religious doubts were part of the displays. Nearby was the Asia Society founded by the man who studied Sanskrit and proposed the idea of an Indo-European language.
The Jain Temple* was a fantastic site, representative of Western Indian art since the Jains came from the West to do business in Kolkata and did well. A friend here asked what I’d seen that was lovely and I think that this temple was the only place I would put in that category.
The Marble Palace* is a private mansion with art treasures. The family that owns it does not think it right to ask guests to their home to pay admission so it is badly in need of updating. Our guide noted that only 150 years ago the women were consigned the live their lives on the balcony level while men could be in the courtyard and come and go.
Kumibari* is the idol-making area of the city where the deities are constructed
from straw and covered with clay and lavishly decorated for festivals throughout the year. Kolkata is noted for its terra cotta.
St. John’s . has as its main feature a monument to the victims of the Black
Cemetery Hole of Calcutta where English people smothered to death while
in rooms where they’d been placed overnight in 1756. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_of_Calcutta for the
details and doubts. Lord Curzon had the monument made in 1899 to replace one that had disappeared in 1822 which, of course, gave
nationalists a cause and his monument had to be moved from near the site of the actual “hole” to the cemetery.
The University has a museum with regional treasures displayed in an old-fashioned manner where we met Larry’s brother one day. He then took us to the local coffee house which is adorned with a picture of Tagore and was the meeting place of the Indian nationalists for decades. Maybe it still is. It has atmosphere but does need some refurbishing, I think.
The banks of the Hooghly, which is the local name of the Ganges River, a broad river crossed by the famous Howrah bridge. The river and the bridge were busy with traffic.
The Howrah station was busy even at 8 in the morning. We were warned it would take
an hour to get there but the trip took only twenty minutes by cab so we had time to look around. One man was washing off the bases
of the columns. We saw families that seemed to live there. People quickly came and went. The train we took was old and the fans seemed not to work since they had cobwebs in them but the trip out to the countryside was moderately comfortable.
A bustee Larry’s brother took us to a train platform where we could look
down on an example of this kind of slum. There were acres of
low, black A-frame buildings with no windows and barely separated from one another along narrow lanes. My lungs burned for an hour from the acrid air above the settlement. How do people survive living there?
Tollygunge Neighbors from Thoiry, the Cockerills, who were in Kolkata for
the holidays invited us for an evening at the club where they were staying. It’s very “Rajish” and quite a contrast to other places we’d seen. They also invited us for drinks our first night and then for New Year’s Eve in Sudeshna’s mother fine apartment on a quiet(!) street in the center of the city. We appreciated their hospitality and a chance to see life inside the buildings we passed.
From the small world department -- an Indian couple we’d spent long hours with in Air India lines in London were on the streets looking for a cab the same time we were early New Year’s Day. Their luggage from the US had just arrived a week late.
Outside Kolkata
We did get out of the city. A friend of Larry’s brother, Ujjwal, went with us to Shantiniketan, a town where Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, had founded a school that he turned into a renowned and international university after he won the award. Tagore’s grandfather had had a home in the area and Tagore built several others. We rode on uncomfortable pedicabs through the open areas of the school and visited the museum which is being redone and was very crowded. I was most impressed by letters between Tagore and Gandhi whom Tagore supported but with whom he had real differences. Noting that I needed a break, Ujjwal took us out to a park where we happened onto the filming of the TV action series which we watched with a large circle of on-lookers. Wikipedia reports that Shantiniketan has become a place for the wealthy intellectuals to build homes so that the town is changing from the peaceful place Tagore envisioned to a wealthy suburb.
The train home was totally packed since the town was experiencing the last days of the Poush Mela, a celebration of art and music started by Tagore’s father. It was a “wasn’t that interesting in retrospect” three-hour second class ride with people packed on the bench seats and jammed standing in the aisles. Jeff was the sixth person on a bench for four once enough people left so that we could actually sit down. The bench, again for four, across from us held seven people. Our guide finally found a place to sit on the luggage rack above the seats. Just another form of the extreme sport.
And our last two days were spent getting to, traveling around in, and returning from Sunderbans, a wildlife preserve for the Bengal tiger of which there are 268. We did not see a tiger but did see miles of farmland and villages and brick kilns. We were told that it is more profitable for farmers in the region to harvest the clayey soil and sell it to the brick factories than it is to grow crops. Once when our bus stopped, I counted 23 tall kilns from the window, all spewing dark smoke. It was smoggy even in Sunderbans.
In the camp which was well run albeit touristy, we took launches through the estuaries of the mangrove forests which was very relaxing. One controversy in the area is why the tigers attack humans, a tendency local humans counter by wearing masks on the back of their heads since it’s thought that tigers attack only from behind. One proposal was that it was something in the salty water the tigers drink, a notion that has not stood up to scientific scrutiny. My theory is that there’s not that much other food, at least I didn’t see much wildlife. I’m glad we did Sunderbans last. It would have been hard to go back to the bustle of Kolkata for several more days.
Some lasting images
A group of three men wanting to get out of a parking place simply checked out the cars in front and then pushed the cars ahead of their car forward (all cars seem to be left in neutral) and created the space to leave.
A family of twelve or so who may have lived in rooms without running water or on the street took baths in the hydrant. First the children bathed, then the men and finally the women, the latter groups keeping clothes on and washing under the clothes.
Men with mesh baskets on their heads filled with live chickens.
Vendors pushing carts through the streets with hot oil sloshing around
Tethered cows in the countryside and not herds like I see here.
A group of people picking through trash and street sweepers burning the piles of trash they’d swept up.
“Goods” trucks filled with men, presumably day laborers.
Mud huts with thatched roofs, occasionally with squash or melon vines on the roof and with woven mats for walls or cowpies for cooking stuck to the mud walls.
Markets everywhere, often with multiple stands selling the same thing in one area.
Shopping in a tourist store that so reeked of moth balls that I couldn’t stay inside. Europe has banned them because they are lethal to humans. And people work in that environment.
Small children whose family home is a bit of carpet on a sidewalk. Occasionally I looked down to find a two or three-year-old tapping on my leg begging for money. All the guide books say to not give money to beggars but to make a contribution to one of the groups that helps the poor but it can be difficult.
Personal ads in the paper with men looking for beautiful brides willing to go with them to the Emirates.
The tout following us as we checked out a market under a roof near Sutter Street. Even when we deliberately tried to lose him, he found us, trying to lure us to some store or other.
People moving in to observe us looking at a map just out of curiosity or to watch bargaining over pedicab rates. (Note, having someone working so hard to move me around was not a comfortable experience.)
The glorious Himalayas as we flew home with all of northern India under a cloud of smog. My immediate thought was that the planet is doomed. And Tata is just introducing its cheap car.
Factoids
It is worth noting that the street where the US and British have their consulates was renamed for Ho Chi Minh.
The US sent its first ambassador to India in 1792. He arrived in 1794. India Company, however, would recognize him only as a commercial agent but he stayed.
The current governor of West Bengal is Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson.
Bangladesh has a military dictatorship form of government.
Notes to other travelers based on our limited experience with one city:
If going at Christmas, book flights and rooms the previous February. It seems every expat Indian and Bangladeshi returns home for the holidays. That also means there are many more people than usual at historic sights.
Book train tickets early. We weren’t sure of our plans and we got delayed so couldn’t do so. Somewhere there is an office that has an allotment of seats for foreigners although we’re not certain that there is a limit to the number of seats sold. Except for price we’re not sure of the difference between first and second class since visually there was not much difference and we never took first.
Fly Jet Airways.
Stay away from tourists centers like Sutter Street.
Taxi drivers speak only very basic English. Stay near a familiar landmark.
Learn survival words. We should have learned the 25 basic words for traveling to a country (Hello, good-bye, please, thank you, numbers to ten, etc.) in Hindi and Bengali.
We all agreed that if we needed to go back to Kolkata, we’d send Jeff.
I have some other literary thoughts based on some reading I’ve done, but, as the French say, at eight pages “ça suffit.” Larry will put our pictures on the website (www.lsprice.net) but you can also check out
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/02/world/0302-INDIA_index.html
Now to the rest of our lives which I hope to send out in a day or two. It’s still snowing but we have skills for that extreme sport, too
Sandy