Call it Calcutta or Kolkata — it is a city that is easy to fall in love with. A city that clings to every bit of its history to preserve its heritage. A bit of the past juxtaposed with the present.
Kolkata is a place that I love to the core. The very thought of visiting the city stirred up excitement in my soul. Come vacation time and I would be looking forward to going to the “City of Joy” to be with my grandma’s maternal family. And to catch up with my Bengali friends, I had this “Bong Connection” to Kolkata. It used to be just one night journey by train from my hometown, Ranchi.
Kolkata is not a city you visit during a short trip. There’s a lot to see and rushing through the tourist traps makes little sense. To get a true feel for the city, you have to stay there for a few days and experience its people, food and traffic jams. To me the only way to experience Kolkata is to live the city life to the fullest. It can feel like being in kaleidoscope. I must have visited Kolkata more than a hundred times but still the diversity of this city never ceases to amaze me.
Let me paint a picture of the city for you. Kolkata has its own unique feel —the old yellow Ambassador taxi, the peeling paint on crumbling colonial architecture and people on the streets everywhere. The ever-spreading banyan trees reluctantly give a little room for modern buildings to squeeze in between. Not an inch of the city is without hustle and bustle.
The most different thing about this city is the iconic mode of transport — the hand-drawn rickshaws pulled by the rickshaw pullers as they weave their way through busy, narrow streets taking tourists in the Bara Bazaar area — the biggest wholesale market in Asia. The rickshaws are scary but the ride is exciting. And the old trams aren’t intimidated by the modern-day SUVs that tailgate them. No matter which mode of transport you take — the taxi, bus or tram — you will definitely enjoy the old Bollywood songs of Kishore Kumar or Kumar Sanu — the two singers every Bengali is proud of.
