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Recursion

(56,582 posts) Mon Dec 9, 2013, 12:47 PM Dec 2013

And now, Vivekenanda park in Calcutta (pics)

So, during the day Friday and Saturday, when my wife was doing all the stuff Indian women do when they get married, I was basically exiled from the house and cooled my heels in Ballygunge (a neighborhood in South Calcutta). I took some pics and thought I would share them:

One rule of thumb I have for deciding if a place is in the developing world or not is how many animals there are on the streets.

Here's a goat, who apparently doesn't like having his picture taken without being given food (he came over and baa'ed, and then butted me in the knee when I didn't give him anything).

Here's his friend, who was much more mellow

And there's half a goat, with a dog looking on wistfully

And another dog. As far as I can tell all the street dogs in India look like that: long snouts, short hair, curly tail, perky ears.

Here's Safari Park, an animal park where kids can ride a little train past monkeys and elephants.

These are the cricket batting cages at Vivekenanda Park

And a civic association cricket club playing a match (the British didn't allow real civic associations, but did allow sports associations, which almost immediately became civic associations de facto).

The bowler, about to stump out the batsman (or maybe it was LBW; I couldn't quite see -- he was retired after that bowl, at any rate).

This is either a Durga or a Kali; I'm not sure

Clean water is always a challenge in India. Most of the population relies on civic water supplies, which are notoriously unhealthy. I don't give money to begging children (Amnesty says most are victims of human trafficking, and don't get to keep the money) but I do usually carry around bottles of clean water to give them.

Here's an overhead water tower

Here it is from farther away. It's filled by the city from the Hooghly river (though it's at least nominally treated first).

Pumps like this are what the poor use; they're turned on at specific times during the day and people come and fill up their buckets and bottles.

Needless to say, people get sick all the time from the water; it's better than drinking straight from the Hooghly, but still unhealthy. I don't know the numbers for Calcutta, but in Mumbai the WHO estimates 10,000 die every year from waterborne diseases.

So, access to health care is important. Here's the government-run clinic:

It's also a youth center, drinking water station (this water is generally distilled; you aren't supposed to use it for washing, though), and upstairs I think is a small library annex, if my Bengali reading is to be trusted (it often isn't). There are buildings like this all over the place. West Bengal (the state Calcutta is in) was explicitly communist until a few years ago, and has a lot of public buildings (and an unfortunate -- to me at least -- history of tearing down Mughal and Colonial buildings to replace them with blocklike Realist slabs).

This, meanwhile, is a private clinic literally 20 yards away.

Calcutta is a less vocally religious city than Mumbai in a lot of ways; here is a typical temple.

And, here's a "hoarding" (poster) for the FIFA world cup trophy tour that's coming to Calcutta soon, which is lucky for them since it's the only way a FIFA trophy is coming to India any time soon. (ZING! Though I'll regret this when Germany kicks our ass next year...)

Calcutta (or, to be PC, Kolkata) is an amazing city. It's smaller and denser than Mumbai, and hasn't sprawled like Mumbai has (if you check a map the reason makes sense; it's topographically constrained on all sides unlike Mumbai, which can just keep spreading north up the coast). My impression is it's more "intellectual" in a vague way, and definitely more artistic. My uncle, at one point in the 1980s, took off from work at his bank for a month without telling anybody (!) because my father in law was back in India. When his coworkers called up, they weren't terribly concerned about the work, but that the rehearsals for the office play they were producing were being affected. Also, they wanted him for the caroms tournament that week... A comparison I've heard, which I think is good in a lot of ways, is that Mumbai is New York and LA combined, and Calcutta is Boston (or even just Cambridge).