After spending a considerable amount of time in Kolkata,
over the last four odd years, and trying recently to organize a 300-plus event
here, I have observed some peculiarities of the city which – frankly – irritate
me no end. While some of my local Bengali friends will see the need to notice,
talk about, and change these things. Others, less open minded and more
immature, will see this as just an outpouring of my supposed hate for Bengal
and all things Bengali. Either way, here are the facts as I have observed them
…
·
I could not make an electrician do some basic
work in 4 years. Call call call, they don’t arrive. When one finally arrives,
he takes a look at the work, says “parts niye kalke ascchi” (I’ll be back with
the spare parts tomorrow)…and never comes back…. This was repeated with 6 or 7
people. Finally I have given up. I now prefer to buy a new fan for my flat
rather than go through the stress of trying to find a kolkata electrician to
repair it. I later realized it is this way for all professions in this city.
Professionalism is not just lacking, it is ABSENT.
·
Haven’t found a single tailor yet who knows the meaning of “delivery date” and can
follow instructions. As for western wear, forget it! They can manage salwaar
kameez provided you don’t want anything too fancy or unusual, and maybe a short
kurti or two, but talk about shirts, trousers, and fitted tops and they are all
blank. Even if you give them a sample they cannot reproduce it. Does one have
to go to a Gents tailor to get women’s shirts made? I wonder. Am still waiting
for a set of clothes I had given to the fifth tailor I have tried here, FOUR
MONTHS AGO!
·
A buffet dinner in Kolkata means something totally different from a buffet
anywhere else in the world. When I was trying to decide about how many plates
to tell the caterer to provide, I was told (by the caterer as well as friends
and relatives) to budget for at least 10 to 12 plates more than the number of
heads. Seemed strange to me, being used to ordering 10 less in case of last
minute cancellations etc. why more? I asked. Well, they said, you have to plan
for the packages people will take home. TAKE HOME? What? From a buffet? Yes,
apparently a Kolkata invitee will ask for a packed dinner to take home for any
member of the family who was unable to make it to the event! How ridiculous is
that? I have to say, in my long and varied life in so many cities in India, and
from my acceptably limited knowledge of the rest of the world, I have never
come across this practice anywhere else. When you are invited somewhere, you
either show up and eat, or don’t show up and don’t eat. What’s all this
take-away business?
·
Oh! And a lot of people change plates in the
middle of a buffet meal! Not the usual, rest of India dinner plate changed to
dessert plate, but multiple dinner plates, one after each course or so! What?
Why? Because how can a Bengali eat mutton on a plate tasting of fish (HUH?) and
so on. What the duffers fail to realize is that caterers count dinner plates to
decide what to charge. So every time some idiot, completely uninformed about
global manners, changes his plate because it tastes funny, the host ends up
paying for an extra, non-existent person!
·
No one chews with their mouth closed! At
every single event I have been at in Kolkata, no matter what the class or
education or age of the people there, I have not seen anyone chew with their
mouth closed! My enjoyment of typically catered Bengali food was low enough to
begin with, but now it has completely gone, because every time I raise my head
or look around I am treated to the sight of wide open and cavernous mouths in
various stages of masticating food! Ewwwwwwww!
·
Home delivery is a new concept in
Kolkata. Pan Indian chain stores like Spencer and Big Bazaar can be
credited with bringing the concept to this city, barely a half decade ago.
Still, the idea only exists in the context of groceries, packed goods, and a
VERY FEW restaurants. The concept of vegetables, raw fish, fruits, and stuff
from the neighbouring grocery store coming home at the end of a phone call is
still very far away, let alone something like Dial A Meal where you can call
ONE number to order from ANY restaurant in the city. Although all of this was
personally experienced by me in Chennai in 1986, in Mumbai in 1991, Hyderabad
in 1999, and Pune 1995 onwards, Kolkata still does not have all this.
·
Dominos does not deliver in half the city! I
had the shock of my life upon calling the hunger helpline and ordering a large
pepperoni! Having lived in so many Indian cities, some of them much smaller and
less important than KOLKATA, I have no concept of Dominos saying “sorry ma’am
we do not deliver in your area” (and I was in an area like PATULI at the time,
not even my neighbourhood which is lowbrow)! What planet is this????? Oh! And
there are only two MacDonald’s in the entire city! KFC used to be 2 branches,
until they opened a couple more recently.
·
People almost faint when they see a woman
buying alcohol or cigarettes, although I know plenty of Kolkata bong women who
smoke and drink!! Two faced gawaarness. They even look like they have seen a
ghost when I try to buy birth control for heaven’s sake! How VILLAGE is that?
·
There are a number of huge malls here now.
The malls open at 9 AM. Great right? No! Because most of the shops In That Open
Mall will not open until 11, and so you wander around like a
ghost. Want to get something to munch on? To pass the time? What a laugh! The
god forsaken food court does not open until 1pm!!! I’ve never seen
this before…mall opens, all shops open, and food court definitely opens! That’s
logical, that’s how you make most sales! Only apparently this simple logic does
not apply in kolkata.
·
People still don’t use pressure cookers for their daily cooking! In the 21st century, with India
reeling under a chronic LPG shortage, 99% of educated, modern, progressive,
cultured, Bengali homes in Kolkata use pressure cookers only for the
once-a-week mutton cooking (many not even for that)! Everything from rice and dal,
to the raw bananas for a kofta, and even fish, chicken, (mutton too in some
cases), its ALL cooked in open vessels! That’s not just regressive, and rural,
it is CRIMINAL! It’s a miracle they even moved from wood burning stoves and
chulhas to gas! What’s the logic behind wasting 3 hours, and liters of gas on
something that should take 20 minutes? That food does not taste good when cooked
in a pressure cooker. This is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard in
my life! Not only does it taste BETTER, it is also a lot more nutritious, and
the process wastes a lot less of the fossil fuels we are running out of so
fast! And the proof? The very people, who NEVER use a cooker at home for fear
of loss of taste, almost eat their own fingers and cant stop complimenting the
food at my home, where there are 6 pressure cookers. I NEVER cook ANYTHING in
any other way if there’s the remotest chance of using a pressure cooker.
·
I couldn’t get a roll at Howrah station…one
of the busiest in Asia, and possibly in the world, because they were selling
dinner… at 5 pm!!! Any other station, VT and Churchgate in Mumbai are of comparable size, would have a
parallel process serving snacks while some serve dinner. And what is worse, the
counter guy was incredibly rude, and almost shooed me off like a pariah stray
dog.
·
I ordered tandoori chicken for the clan from
a really famous Kolkata chain of moghlai and tandoori items. They have outlets
all over the city, and are famous for their food. I was out shopping, and at
around 6 pm I called them to order the chicken, expecting it to be at home by
the time I got back. They took the order, my phone number, etc. Imagine my
surprise when I arrived at the house to find an absolute absence of any
tandooris of any kind. It was 8.30 pm by now, and not only had the food not
arrived, no calls had arrived either to let us know the cause of delay. I rang
up the restaurant, only to be told that “tandooris have not been coming for a
couple of days madam, not sure I can fill your order, but let me see…” this is
when I lost my temper and yelled at the guy. Why the hell did he take my order
in the first place, given that the supply of chicken has been down for 2 days.
If he did so expecting things to miraculously change, why didn’t he call me
when it became obvious that there was no change? What the hell kind of
unprofessionalism is it that made me set out at 9pm to find dinner, when – with
the right warning – I could have just bought the stuff on my way home?
·
Something similar is going on with my
mother’s backup washing machine as I write this. The stand for the machine,
ordered something like 10 days ago is arriving today. The store we got the
machine from called to say that the guy has been dispatched with the stand. Great
news we thought, and have been waiting for the past 3 hours for the guy t
arrive, covering the 1 km from the store to this flat. Then the shop calls to
say that they have told him to take a certain price, but he might try to get
more so we have to haggle. What does that mean? Doesn’t the store have a fixed
price? and why does the delivery guy get to decide? And why does the customer
have to haggle with the delivery guy rather than the store? This in itself is
totally incomprehensible. However, what is more interesting is that he has not
arrived in 3 hrs, and when I called the store right now, they were surprised.
They called him up, he said he had gone off for lunch (for 3 hrs????), and will
come in the evening. What is amazing to me is that the store calmly passed this
message to me. No penalty for not doing the job on time, no penalty for not
informing the store OR the customer of this change in plans, nothing?
·
You cannot get breakfast outside the home in
kolkata. There are no little udipi joints (which are present EVERYWHERE else in
India). If you want to eat out in the morning you have two choices. Leather
like puris with a really spicy potato curry, or equally leather like
parathas (which the vendor will squash
before selling to you for some reason, with a horrible pea and potato curry. Nothing
else is available, not even the rolls and moghlai parathas that kolkata is
famous for. Those are EVENING foods, you see. As for dosas, vada sambhar, upma,
or other stuff that I can get at every 10 steps in any other city (including
NAGPUR), you can just forget it! This is Kolkata…you eat what the vendor feels
like selling to you, not what you feel like eating.
·
We wanted to have lunch. So we went to a mid
range restaurant in the city. Knowing what the city is like, and seeing that
the watch only said 12.18pm, I poked my head into the place and asked “khabar
pawa jabeto?” (can we get food now?) I was confidently told yes, at which point
I asked my brother to go park the car while I got us a table. Bhai left, I
walked in, was about to sit down when the guy, one of the three people lounging
there, asked me “parcel to madam?” (takeaway right?). I said no… we were going
to eat right there. Then he tells me parcel can be given immediately, but if you
sit there and eat you have to wait for an hour! Makes no kind of sense to me,
so I ask him why. Apparently the “dishwasher” hasn’t arrived. Now, there are 2
aspects to this ridiculousness that are beyond insane. One, the “dishwasher,
whose job it is to arrive at 9 and wash the dishes before the restaurant opens,
has not arrived at 12.20. secondly, the staff, the waiters, manager, etc, would
rather turn customers away than do the “menial” chhota job of washing a couple
of plates! How unprofessional is that?
·
We went to a fairly posh restaurant for lunch
the other day. There was practically no one else there, it being a weekday
afternoon, and one could see from the lazy attitude of the waiters that this
was not going to turn suddenly into rush hour. We are a little crazy in my
family, and we have unrealistic (by Kolkata standards) expectations when we go
out to eat. We care about ambience, cleanliness, absence of that all-spices
stink, and yes, a view – if we can get it. None of these seems to be on the
priority list of the average Kolkata diner, who will eat anywhere, no matter
how stinky, dirty, and claustrophobic, as long as they serve large portions of
what the Kolkata resident considers good food (another thing I don’t agree
with, but that’s another story). So, here we are at a place that meets our
approval in many ways, and it even has a large window wall! This is by no means
a common sight in most mid range restaurants in the city, which seem to
actively avoid having a view, and even have blinds drawn on any isolated miniscule
windows they might have. There were five of us, and a large table at the window,
an eight-seater. So we headed for it happily, expecting to have lunch with a
view. But no! this is Kolkata! We were rudely headed off by a waiter who
insisted we take a 6-seater table instead, far away from the window. The whole
bloody place was empty! His logic was “niyom nei” (it is not allowed) which is
the favourite fall back of all in this city. When faced with logic, such as
there are five of us, the place is empty, you can always push together two
4-seater tables in the remote possibility of a party of eight actually
arriving, etc, he just parroted this “niyom nei”. As a result, the entire meal,
the table stood empty, and the restaurant remained as vacant as it was at the
beginning, and we ate at a non-view table. I find this amazing. Anywhere else,
yes, they will try to convince you to occupy a smaller table, but would have
given us the one we wanted since the place was empty. Elsewhere in the world
customer IS king. Apparently the customer is a serf in Kolkata and will bloody
well sit where we tell it to!
·
I have been unable to find tofu here. I
happen to like tofu, and cheeses, and so-called exotic vegetables. In my five
year hunt, I have not managed to find either tofu or cheeses here, and although
broccoli, gherkins, red and yellow bell peppers, and purple cabbage are
officially available at the Spencer’s and Big Bazaars, they are intermittent
and irregular. So it’s a matter of luck on any given day, and you cant plan a
menu or a dinner on that basis. Cheese is not a concept here except maybe among
the very “hi-fi” crowd, whose lives I have no access to. For the normal middle
to upper middle class Kolkattan, cheese is made by Amul or Brittania and comes
in cubes or slices. Thanks to those companies, a few have actually heard of
concepts like cheddar, mozzarella, or gouda, but those are the processed and packaged
versions as well. I have no hope of finding good fresh Emmental, Gruyere, or
blue cheese, or even Brie here. Tofu, available at every single neighbourhood
supermarket in Mumbai, pune, etc, is something I haven’t seen yet in this city.
Even Chinese restaurants don’t offer it on their menu, and those that have tofu
dishes on the menu never seem to have them in reality.
·
Chili chicken, that all Indian janta chines
favourite, was a major shock. The first time I ordered it, at a middle rung
restaurant in Kolkata, I got a bit of a jolt. Instead of the chicken strips I
am used to eating everywhere else in India, largish pieces of chicken arrived,
WITH BONE! Whaaat? I thought the restaurant didn’t know what it was doing, and
gave them a lecture about how chili chicken is supposed to be strips, cubes, or
thin slices of chicken processed in corn flour, friend, then stir fried with
chillies, capsicum, and soya sauce. It was only later, after going through
several of these, that I realized that that’s what chili chicken means here. If
you want the normal all-India version, you have to order the BONELESS chili
chicken!
·
You can’t buy veggies, fresh chicken, or fish
when you want in this city. Yu have to
do it all when the BAJAR is open, early in the morning, with a consolation run
in the evening (when only half the stuff is available. There are no all day
veggie stores, fresh fish outlets or chicken sellers. If you want to do
something as unnatural as buy your produce in the middle of the day, you have to make do with the 3 day old greens and
frozen chicken at the Spencer’s or Big Bazaar (thank god for these chains). As
for fish – you can buy it when the rest of Kolkata buys it, or forget about it.
Again, I cannot buy when I want, I have to buy when Kolkata insists I buy!
·
For the last 4 years or so, one has finally
been bale to rent a car or just a driver in Kolkata. For many, many years, I would come in from Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad,
Nagpur, etc and be shocked that I could not get a temporary driver or a rented
car. Finally, a few years ago, the service began to be available. And yet, four
or five years later, they are still ONLY available for the 7 hour slots. In all
the other cities I have lived in, there are multiple options. Yes, the standard
unit is the 7 or 8 hours/70 or 80 km. However, if I don’t need one for that
long, I can rent it for four hours, at a slightly higher hourly rate. Same for
the drivers. However, I don’t have this option in Kolkata. Here, even if my
work is for a couple of hours, I HAVE to get the car or the driver for 7 hours!
·
I was unable to find a single writer with
decent American, British and Australian English in 6 months and more. Most
Kolkata people seem to use the “70 years out of date” over verbose, over formal,
over “textbook” British English that even the British no longer use. As for
American or Australian English, it might as well be Greek or Latin. They have
no clue such things exist, let alone knowing them enough to write in them.
·
Moreover, I could not even get replies or CVs
of Kolkata based writers from online classifieds and jobsites, because the
locals don’t seem to know how to search the internet, which is an essential
skill for this line of work. With large projects in hand, office space and
machines in place, I had to give up on the idea of a Kolkata branch for lack of
workers.
·
When looking for a home to buy in Kolkata I
noticed another strange thing. Most of the apartment buildings in the city,
even the brand new ones, don’t have adequate parking facilities! Say a society
has 2 buildings, with eight apartments each; one would expect 16 parking spots
in the complex, one for each of the owners, right? Wrong! In Kolkata, you are
lucky if it has four! There’s even a fairly good chance it might not have ANY!!
The only thing I can conclude from this is a lack of car culture, and a more
rural mindset which tries to maximize living space but sees no need to earmark
space for such LUXURIES as cars or bikes.
·
Until very recently, (like a couple of months
ago), one could not book a gas cylinder on the phone here. For the last five
years or so I have seen people call and call the numbers given on the little
gas books, the numbers of the dealer, and get the same messages. “the number
you are calling is temporarily disconnected”, “the number you are calling is
not responding”, “the number you are calling is busy”. Now, while I have
occasionally gotten all of these messages when calling my gas dealer in Pune or
Mumbai or Nagpur, it was by no means a constant thing, and eventually I got
through and booked my cylinder. In Kolkata, in five years, neither my mother
nor I have been able to get through EVEN ONCE! Every time a cylinder had to be
booked, it had to be done by going to the agency in person, standing in the
line with other unfortunates, and booking the damn thing at the counter! Thank
god they implemented centralized voice activated booking a couple of months
ago!
·
Office timings here are 10 to 5 when the rest
of India works on a 9 to 6 schedule. This does not include the inevitable
lackadaisical attitude of the people which makes the real office time around 11
(even though dawn happens here around 4 am, and 11 is practically afternoon). Which
is why, unlike every other metro in India, rush hour in Kolkata is between 9.30
and 10.30, instead of 8.30 to 9.30 am. As for end of day, officially it is 5 instead
of 6 (why no one knows), so the evening rush hour starts getting underway from
4.30 pm onwards. Yes, the work ethic sucks, this is but a small example of it.
·
Shops open at 11.00 am. Which is ridiculous
in itself. Shops open at 9 or before in most cities, even the ones which do not
claim to be a metro. Then the shops in Kolkata close at 1pm!!!!!!!!!! Till 5
pm!!!!!!!!!!! This is unimaginable in any other major city. Then, shops close
again by 8.30, or if you are lucky 9!!!!!!!! How is anyone supposed to go
shopping in this city? I get out of the house at 9am, before it gets insanely
hot, and would love to get my shopping finished before the scorching
starts….but NO! Can I wait until later? Until after I finish some work? NO! It
must be precisely timed between 11.30 and 1, and 5.30 and 8.30. Because unlike
REAL metro cities, shops are NOT open till 10 or 11pm here.
·
For the nth time today I walked out of a
store in disgust. Kolkata store keepers just will not serve you! You walk into
a store and it’s a competition of nonchalance. A contest of wills between you
and the shopkeeper to see who cracks first. A Kolkata shopkeeper will NEVER,
NEVER ask you what you want. We’ve actually tried this, dad and I. In an empty
shop, the person behind the counter will resolutely and fixedly stare over your
head, or do something else, instead of glancing at you and asking “may I help
you?” or even a simple ”yes?” Once you manage, of your own initiative, to
attract their attention, the storekeeper, like today, will insist that you tell
him EXACTLY what you want so he can fetch just that item out of storage. Unlike
Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Nagpur, Pune, where they show you 200 sarees, and 25
upholstery samples before they expect you to pick one, here you better know
precisely what you are looking for before you get into the shop. DO NOT expect them
to show you more than MAYBE a couple of items (if you are lucky).
·
We went to buy shoes for my brother. Walked into a huge swanky shoe store in a major market
area of the city. After having checked out a number of other stores on this
shopping trip, and not having found anything we wished to buy, we were really
glad when this store had some lovely chappals and shoes that we all liked. Bhai
asked the salesman for a couple of the better designs in size 9. The salesman,
being the magical expert of all things footwear, insisted bhai hold his foot
out, examined it from afar with his micrometer eyes, and declared that a size 8
is more than enough. “8 I apnar size”. Now these are not the first shoes my bro
is buying. He is 32, and has been wearing shoes for some 30 years of his life. Presumably,
having had the same shoe size for the last 10 years or so, he knows what it is?
Also, even if an 8 “will do” for him, but he wants a 9, it is his choice. But
no…. in Kolkata you cannot buy what YOU want, you must buy what the SHOPKEEPER
wants you to buy. So the salesman insisted on selling us the size 8, refusing
to even get the 9 out of storage!
·
Most of the stores STILL don’t accept credit
cards. If they do, they expect you to shop for a certain minimum amount, or
charge 100 rupees extra! This is true even of jewelry stores!!! We shopped with
cards in Chennai in 1986… almost all large and medium stores accepted them, and
many small ones as well. Mumbai, since 1991, we have shopped with plastic. In
Pune, even if I went to a tiny, hole-in-the-wall shop in Tulsibag, they would
take plastic, for any amount, without any extra charges!
·
Looking for a HATKE saree for my family
wedding, I went through ALL the major saree stores in Kolkata with no result. 4
floors of sarees, and all they have are endless repeats of the same old tired
designs. I asked for something in purple and was met with sullen comments like
“how is it possible to be so specific madam”. In entire stores with thousands
of sarees, they could not find me 10 pieces in purple! I miss the mega stores
like Shagun in Pune and even the small stores like Man Mandir in Malad, Mumbai
which had endless variety. End of the day I had to go to a NON Bengali store,
called Jaylakshmi, where they displayed one piece after the other, with the
smiles never leaving their faces, saying “just take a look ma’am this is new,
don’t buy, just take a look”, and found me EXACTLY what I wanted! Reminded me
of nicer cities.
·
People here are
unbelievably rude, all the time! Especially people in the
service industry! From waiters, and sales staff, to storekeepers, mechanics,
electricians, carpenters, tailors, you name it. None of them has ANY clue how
to talk to a customer, and has never heard of the politeness principle of the
English language. Thank you, please, may I help you, smiles, soft tones, none
of this computes with them. THEY are the rulers, the great ones doing you a
favour, and the customer is the beggar, the beholden one who is being blessed
with this favour. Even national and international chains seem to be unable to
train this out of their staff! The staff remains sullen, perpetually angry,
offensive, and combative!
·
Kolkata used to be
renowned for its helpful and caring folk, and how well it treated its women. Recently,
in the run up to the family event, my father and I were running around getting
stuff done when the car broke down on us. For close to an hour and a half, in
the blazing summer sun, in one of the hottest days in the last five years, I
pushed the car down kolkata streets, ALONE, while my old father steered and
tried to get it started, without a SINGLE offer of help from any KOLKATA resident.
Were the roads magically deserted? No. was I invisible? NO. hundreds of people
stopped to watch, craned their necks out of buses, autos, cabs, cars, almost
caused accidents by turning back entirely on bikes to see this fun sight, but
no one, NOT A SINGLE PERSON, offered to help or asked what was wrong. Finally,
when I came upon a bunch of men sitting outside a shop, passing the time, I
asked for their help. They REFUSED! They made excuses like there are no
labourers, who will push now…. Four strong young men sitting around… pushing a
car is beneath them I suppose.
·
I haven’t yet seen a doctor here who
prescribes antacids with pain killers or recommends vitamin b-complex with
antibiotics. This routine, and necessary pairing, seems to be an absent concept
here.
·
Gynecologists have never heard of using a
curtained off area, or cover sheets when they do an internal pelvic exam. They
expect you to just pull your pants down and sprawl on the rubber examining
table, without a sheet over you, while they poke and prod at your private
parts. And this is true even for the best known ones in really good clinics! The
only place I have seen, which was worse in this matter than Kolkata, was
Nagpur. But Nagpur is a small town, this is a METRO city proud of its CALCHAAR
and education. So why this absence of basic dignity at a
doctor’s office?
·
My brother was taken ill with food poisoning
like symptoms, runs, extreme nausea, frequent vomiting, in the middle of the
night. At 3 am we rush him to this fairly large hospital in the area. Turns out
they have no emergency room, no doctor on duty! Where to go now? At this point
bhai is so sick he can hardly sit up. So we ask them which hospital to take him
to. Turns out none of the hospitals close by…including some of the big ones on
the E M Bypass, have emergency rooms or intake facilities!! Finally find one
behind Highland Park which will admit him at 4 am.
·
So kolkattans cannot fall ill in the night?
Or on Sunday? All the doctors I have come across in this city in five years are
unavailable on Sundays.
·
Bhai was diagnosed with food poisoning, and the
doctor very clearly told the nurses that he was to be given nothing to eat or drink
other than the oral rehydration solution called Electral. Four hours later he
was sent a bowl of cornflakes in milk! Milk! For a lactose intolerant person
with food poisoning! When we protested, we were told the nutritionist has sent
it. Apparently the nutritionist thinks he/she knows better than the doctor. We,
of course, sent it back, refusing to make bhai worse by feeding him such stuff.
·
As for the oral re-hydrase, it didn’t arrive.
For six hours after the prescription, we kept asking for it, and kept being told
“ante gecche, anle debo” (someone’s gone to get it, we’ll bring it when it
arrives). It never arrived. The only thing a seriously ill patient (serious
enough to have been admitted) can eat or drink, and they can’t get it to him in
six hours?!! Finally, when I arrived, I went out and bought some.
·
There was no water in the taps or in the cisterns
or flush tanks. This was not a fleabag hospital. This is one of the better
known ones, plus bhai was in the best room, AC single deluxe room, which cost a
serious bit of money. And yet, there was no water, the AC sounded like a bunch
of pebbles was being tossed around inside it, and the place looked pathetic. Compare
that to any hospital in pune/Mumbai/Hyderabad/Chennai/etc, and you can see the
huge difference. My father was in Lilavati for a couple of weeks. The hospital
to the stars, more like a five star than a treatment facility, they are
courteous, efficient, professional, and surprisingly inexpensive! My mother’s
knee surgery cost more, at a pathetic dump, which cost much more than Lilavati,
but didn’t give even one percent of the service.
·
One cannot get a doctor’s appointment over
the phone in Kolkata. In most places, you have to go in person, or send
someone, to go and “naam lekha” (have your name written) on the day that you
wish to be examined. Best case scenario, some places may allow you to call for
the privilege of having your name written, but only on that day, only at a
certain time, and there is no time estimate attached to it. So…no matter how
many names there are on the list before you, everyone has to get there at the
same time, before the doctor arrives, and sit around waiting their turn.
·
Alternatively, you can have your name
WRITTEN, and arrive there, AFTER which they will give you a sequence based on
who has arrived and who has not (taking the fee in advance. Ensuring you do not
leave). Then everyone gets to hang out till the middle of the night while the doctor
goes through some 30 patients. This happened to me when I broke my foot. I was
forced to sit there, with a broken foot, and painkillers wearing off, for four
full hours while people whose names had been written before me got looked at. Having
paid Rs. 400 in advance, I was stuck. And they have no provision for an
emergency! I finally left the clinic, with the long awaited plaster cast, at 11
pm, six and a half hours AFTER I first arrived there!
·
We couldn’t find a single petrol pump/fuel
station, on the left side of the road, between AJC Bose Road and Patuli. Our
mistake? We crossed this large chunk of the city and decided to use the Eastern
Metropolitan Bypass for a large part of the distance. Naming something
Metropolitan doesn’t make it so, and this is a prime example of that. Its
equivalents in other cities, like the western express in Mumbai, are teeming
with fuel stations, as they should be. The very purpose of a bypass is to
relieve the pressure of traffic on city roads, giving long distance commuters a
fast way to get where they are going. How am I supposed to do that if I have to
keep going into the damn city, and taking u-turns, to get to a fuel pump?
·
Kolkata drivers will not turn on their
headlights in the city, especially on street which have decent halogen
lighting. What the reason behind it is… I have no idea. Maybe it saves on wear
and tear on the headlights? It is not only spooky, but unsafe to face down
these thousands of cars running at me totally without any lights on.
·
All Kolkattans seem to walk at half speed,
all the time. I feel as if I am perpetually on fast forward mode among people
who are all walking in slow mode, and I don’t even walk that fast! In fact,
among my friends from everywhere else, I am probably amongst the slowest. Everyone
here though seems to amble through life as if strolling in their own back
yards. A sense of purpose seems to be totally absent in all of their gaits.
·
This above is true at all times except when
crossing the street. They wait while the cars are stopped at the red light, gabbing,
and passing the time. at the very moment when I am given a green signal to go,
they jump purposefully in front of me, plunging into the onrushing traffic, to
cross the major roads. Maybe they think the red light is aimed at them? And
that the green light for the cars is actually to invite them to cross? There
are some idiots in every city who act in this way, true, but here, it is
EVERYONE! Whole masses and hordes of people, ignoring the pedestrian crossing
signal, and surging across the intersections at the exact wrong moment!
·
There is a unique concept known as the Semi Western
Commode which I have never come across
anywhere else in India,
at least not in posh buildings like in Kolkata. And
what is this amazing invention? It is a commode type thing, lower than a normal
western commode, raised about a foot and a half from the floor. However, and
this is the strange part, it has foot rests for squatting on it!!!! And the
toilet seat is especially designed to cover those foot rests! Essentially it
looks like an Indian latrine raised a foot! What the hell is the point of it? Everywhere else in India, you
have the western loo and the Indian loo. It is only when trying to buy a home
in this city that I first encountered this strange creature called the
semi-western loo! The ridiculous mental picture of someone squatting a foot and
a half high is just too funny! And this is high end flats, not rural or semi
rural!
·
My flat is in an Old area. Not a newly
settled one. It has been part of Kolkata at least since the partition and
independence of India. Yet, in 2012, it does not yet have water pipelines or
direct water supply. This is true of large parts of the city, and groundwater
seems to be the only option in those places!
·
This area also does not have fixed line
Broadband! I couldn’t believe it! I have lived in out of the way crannies like
Sanghvi and Baner Gaon in Pune, and never had to ask twice about internet. This
is a metro city, larger and more important than Pune (if you ask the locals) so
why is infrastructure so pathetic? Is this how a metro is? I think not. In such
a populous and old area I am still forced to work on half speed dongle!
·
Hotel bookings for Bengal tourism or other
hotels, for weekend destinations around kolkata
cannot be done online or on the phone! One has to go to the office…in some
remote locality of the city, and book in person!!!
·
Computer printout and DTP shop owners do not
know how to paste pics in a wordfile, do not know how to change font, do not
know how to reformat a basic file or pic. In fact, none of them seem to know
anything beyond the basic open file and give print command. I miss pune net
cafes like hell…those guys are EXPERTS!
·
Invitation card printers cannot do anything
other than their own catalogue of set patterns, cannot do digital prints,
cannot provide good card stock. I had to search through half of Calcutta before
I found one who would. 11 yrs ago in pune, a small town, non metro, I found the
same in 5 minutes.
·
I had some paintings framed here for the
first time, last week. They came home, I drilled the holes, put the nails and
hooks in place, and went to hang them up. Imagine my surprise when I found that
they had no chains to hang them by! There were hook on the edges of the frames
yes, but no chain connecting them which would go over the nail in the wall to
hold the picture up! Neighbours, helping me hang up my stuff, asked me “why
didn’t you tell them to give the chains?” Apparently people here bring them
home, then attach their own string or twine, and then hang up their paintings!
How was I to know? I have had stuff framed in so many cities but I have never
had to mention this. They ALWAYS came with chains attached, ready to go on the
wall. I had no concept that someone had to ASK for them to provide what the
rest of India considers a part of the basic package!
·
Schools in the city take no responsibility
whatsoever for their “school buses”. These are all operated by private operators
and all dealings are between the parents and the bus operators with the school
having no say, no control, no hand at all in the running of them. Which means,
if the bus doesn’t arrive, arrives late, drives badly, has an accident (which
they very frequently do), or kidnaps or molests my child, I have no recourse,
and the school will take no responsibility at all!
·
Most of the city has no underground sewage
system. Huge open drains by every roadside are common, and calmly accepted. On
stating this to some Kolkata dwellers, I got the reply “but where will the
waste go?” “Uh…..into the SEWERS, under the ground like in all other major
cities????”
·
The state of the roads here is frankly
pathetic. Although South India has the best roads, nowhere in any major city or
around it have I seen such a pitiful state of major arteries, national and
state highways. Being more accustomed to driving
everywhere, we feel the difference strongly, which kolkata people who have
never lived anywhere else or travelled much by car do not seem to notice. It
takes forever to get anywhere, and the wear and tear on the car is
unbelievable! Apparently one cannot expect such basic infrastructure in a METRO
city!
·
The Kolkata metro was the first of its kind
in India. However, 30 yrs later, it is exactly at the same place, no expansions
happened in 30 yrs (work has only now begun to build a network that should have
been in place 20 yrs ago), and what exists is falling apart due to overuse and
lack of maintenance. Delhi, arriving on the scene 25 years after Kolkata, has
overtaken it by acres in connectivity, comfort, efficiency and quality. I am
sure the Mumbai metro will too.
·
The first train of Kolkata metro on weekdays is at 7am, a solid two hours behind Delhi metro’s
first train at 5am. The last train in kolkata is at 9pm, a solid 2.5 hours
earlier than Delhi metro’s 11.30pm. So… even though Kolkata is so much to the
east, and gets its dawn about 2 hours before Delhi, it works 2 hours behind,
essentially wasting 4 hours. Then there’s the 2.5 hours lost at the end of the
day. A metro city? I think not. Oh! And on Sundays the Kolkata metro does not
work in the first half of the day, and services begin only after 2 pm! That’s
the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard!
·
The entire city still has wires strung
everywhere. Neither the electricity nor the telephone wires are either optical
fibers or under ground. Feels very strange when I compare it to Mumbai,
Chennai, Delhi, or even Pune.
·
The lack of GK in the average, on the street,
Kolkata person is APALLING! Their store of knowledge seems to stop at something
like 50 years ago. Tech, social, cyber, professional, no updates have happened
since then.
·
Literature for the reader in Kolkata seems to have ended with T S Eliot, and
reading means Shakespeare or the Russians or Wordsworth. Anything after the
1970s is anathema. Not worth reading, etc etc.
·
Many highly educated and frequently
travelling Kolkata Bengalis I know cannot even load film into their automatic
cameras. The studio loads and unloads the film for them. No wonder the studio
people look at me as if I am from Mars when I take my film in and tell them
exactly how to develop and print, what effects I want, what format to store the
digital versions in and so on!
·
There is no real industrial presence in Bengal, let alone in Kolkata. In the last 30 years
or so, hundreds of thousands of small, medium and large industries
have actually CLOSED down in the state, never to come back. As a result, jobs
are few and far between except for highly educated people and
in the new IT sector. Maybe this is the hallmark of a METRO city to
locals, it is not so to me.
·
There are 3 whole pages of Jyotishi. Bashikaran,
tantric, advertisements in Ananda Bazaar Patrika everyday. If they didn’t get
business from it they would not spend money to advertise. This is educated,
intellectual Bengal? This is not a pulp paper for the rickshaw wallahs, this is
high brow daily for the intellectual artsy crème e la crème! So why are such
people calling these quacks and frauds?
·
I have never seen so
much of the population wearing so many, so visible, astrologically significant
rings, amulets, taga, tabeej etc. I have lived in states like UP, and
Maharashtra, that the average Bengali loves to deride as uneducated and
superstitious, but none of them seem to be as much into these superstitious and
magical “aids” towards improving their lives. Is this what superior education,
superior culture, high thinking, and communism gives? And do they really think
a blood-flow-restricting, cycle-chain-resembling tabeej on the upper arm goes
well with skin tight jeans and a halter top?
·
Proud, educated, cultured, polished Bengal shows DISMAL
statistics in human rights and safety. It is Number 2 in Illiteracy in The
Nation, it ranks at Number 3 In Sex Selective Abortions Of Female Fetuses, and
it is second from last in the matter of safety for women. In addition, this
educated and long term communist state ranks among the lowest in terms of organ
donations and blood donations. However, it ranks very high in human trafficking,
ranking as number one in the country. Also, a UNICEF study has found that
53.9% of girls in the state are married off before the age of 18. It also ranks
number one in India in suicides, especially among young
people ranging from 14 to 25 in age.
·
Polio continues to be a problem, and Bengal is one of
the worst offenders, only behind UP and Bihar in the matter. A mere two weeks after the WHO took India off
the polio-endemic list an 18 month old child was admitted to a state hospital
in Kolkata with polio. The child hails from Indrabala village in South 24
Parganas district. The last detected case of polio in the country was also from
Bengal, in January last year, when a child from Howrah district was afflicted with the virus. There have
been no reports of other polio cases in any other state in the 12 months
between these two cases in Bengal.
·
My
brother will be here for 1 month, and needs to
have some clothes dry cleaned before he leaves. Since the 3rd of June we have been shuttling from one
cleaner to the next, one laundry to the next in search of someone who can do
the work in 22 days. No luck no one in this city seems to be able or willing to
clean 3 kurtas and a dhoti in 22 days! And what’s the reason I am getting? “It’s
raining now madam, how can we guarantee anything?” what has rain got to do with
it? Is it that the DRY cleaners here charge dry cleaning rates and then get the
clothes WASHED by the neighbourhood dhobi?
·
My
brother wanted
to write personal thank you notes to all the guests who had come to the
reception. So we have spent the last four days scouring Kolkata for blank cards
that can be used. You know … a box of identical greeting cards that say thank
you at the top and are blank inside? The kind I can get at any card shop in Pune?
Turns out Kolkata stores have never heard of such a thing! Even the greeting
card stores in the biggest of the malls looked totally blank and then slowly
shook their head “no”.
·
Kolkata is the honking capital of the world. I have lived in much
more congested, far larger cities, with much worse traffic conditions, but I
have never seen one where people honk so much! Everyone seems to always have
one hand on the
horn while they drive, and don’t care if they are near a school or a hospital. They
play their horns compulsively in situations where any one can see it is quite
useless… not likely that the 200 cars in front of you in the jam will magically
disappear because you are honking at them!
·
It took me 4 months and 4 mistrials (with 300 US dollars lost each
time) to finally get the online transfer of money from my Paypal account to my
local bank account sorted! Something that took me 10 mins in pune! Not only can
the employees at the banks here NOT know how to use a computer, they don’t know
NEFT processes, give wrong NEFT numbers, botch up entries! They cannot grasp
why I would want to receive money from non Indian sources when I am not an NRI!
·
Kolkattans still firmly believe that you should NOT drink
water just before you step out of the house into the hot sun. I was actually
told I would not only get fever but actually die if I did that! And contrary to
medical opinion (oh these doctors don’t know what they are talking about) they
wil not let you have water when you arrive from the hot sun! they will torture
you by making you sit for five minutes by the clock before they bring you water
(to prevent pneumonia), and when they do… 80% of the time it will not be cold
or even cool. That’s right, 80% of the calcatians I know never store water in
the fridge in summer! What’s up with that!!!???
·
The great Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport is
a major joke. First of all, no real direct international flights either take
off or arrive here anymore. The only ones that use the terminal are the Mumbai
Kolkata, Delhi Kolkata, tail
end
legs of international routes. The facilities are totally hilarious. The terminal
is more like a dairy yard than an INTERNATIONAL airport. Even the PUNE airport
(which we laughed at all the time) had better facilities. The loos are
disgusting in both the international and domestic terminals, help desks are
nonexistent or uninformed, food stalls etc are badly stocked with stale items.
·
The Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport has a website
which manages to provide NO information AT ALL to passengers or family and
friends. The last time it was updated was in 2008, and although there is a
phone update service advertised on it, that doesn’t work either.
