The guest house was way beyond my expectations, completely air conditioned with a TV on which I could actually watch the French Open (Federer won, YES!) Luxury yeh
was working on saturday morning but ventured out to a mall (South city mall)in the evening. The area around Jadavpur is so new and it reminds me of most Indian cities I have been to, very synthetic, efficient and bereft of any history, but there are malls and you can people watch. There is a coffee day in the top most floor and made a mental note to comeback there!
Sunday was interesting, made a very ambitious plan based on a New York Times travel report to go around many parts of Kolkata but found out to my horror that the reporter most definitely had a car or was splurging on taxis, which is something I would hate to do :-P Either way I ended up going to the very grand and beautiful Victoria Memorial and the museum inside was awesome. Moved to the GPO from there but obviously the post office and the post museum are closed on Sunday :-p! Either way lots of beautiful colonial buildings, trams around Dalhousie square. Sunday afternoons are pretty empty there. Moved on to college street, most book shops were shutting down and most of them seemed to deal with academic books. I wish I could go back there at a better time and find some rare books. The day ended with a satisfying visit to The Coffee House. I instantly liked the place! The only issue was that I was alone and did not have enough people to argue or Adda with :) There was this quasi-irritating pro-communist doctor on my table who kept badgering south India and tamils with his ignorant comments (he felt there were many wine shops in Chennai because Tamil women were not beautiful and one needed alcohol to ignore this fact and marry them)...I felt a lot of pity for that ignorant b***ard!
The coffee was ok (not filter coffee)...but the vegetable pakoda was fantastic.
Discovered some great local food over the next week, which was mostly spent on work in the library. Egg rolls are heavenly and dhokar dalna is one veg bengali dish that has less potatoes than usual...great. I was tired of the indian chinese food which seems very popular in this part of Kolkata, so resorted to some ready made maggie food for the evenings.
Have to mention a couple of things about IACS, great insti with lots of good people (almost everyone is Bengali)..a tad red-taped by bureacratic hassles. The librarian reminded me of my middle school teachers. Very strict on the outside adhering to some irrational principles but persistent request and you can get things done :) the funniest rule in the library was the no personal footwear or use one of the slippers we provide rule. Most of the library staff were friendly (by the way the library was my office during the visit). My only grouse was that it shut down by 7:00 in the evening and I had to go someplace else to work. By the last week some of the graduate students at IACS became good friends and one of them went to the extent of giving me an office space to work after 7:00. These students were among the most motivated students I have seen anywhere, they practically live in their offices doing physics and enjoying life :) Antother interesting incident happened during lunch one of the days. Some middle aged guy approached me and asked me if I was related to Vishy Anand (due to my countenance), I told him I could barely play chess and would be very proud if I was even remotely related to the genius. This was a first, was strangely happy.
Went back to the mall on friday to meet a friend, went to CCD as I had promised myself. They are the best coffee chain in India, very reasonably priced and you know that they care about coffee. She also showed me the one book store in the mall (LandMark style) and I grabbed Amitav Ghose's Calcutta Chromosomes, I was feeling a bit orphaned without anything to read in the nights. This book is pretty interesting, I am halfway through.
Went to meet another family to deliver some stuff from their relatives in Canada, who happen to be my first friends in Canada. This house was brilliant, very old fashioned and Bengali, like it was out of Parineeta's sets. Went to Esplanade from there. Man take Ranganathan St, multiply area by 4 and increase people density by 10 times and you get Esplanade on a Sunday night. I was not into shopping so quicky headed to Park St. The Oxford Bookstore is great there, bought some books. Milan Kundera and Mukul Kesavan and settled for a quite supper at the near by Street pub. Very satisfying Saturday. Sunday was spent working in the afternoon at a Barista cafe, was good since I got some work done after a while :)
The next week was spent on working and trying hard to get some shape to the problem we were interested in. But wednesday was good since I had a chance to meet S, my undergrad mate and a person who I look up to in many ways. I went to the Howrah station to catch him on his way to Allahabad. He is working on a HEP pheno PhD. Crossing the Howrah bridge was breathtaking. I have watched it on TV and movies but nothing can capture what I felt (did not take my camera, I am losing faith in that medium and my memory :-P). We chatted up quite a bit, lot of catching up to do. I always come out of a conversation with S feeling happy. We then tried to sneak up to the first class waiting room that had a lovely view of Howrah and the river but the sentry shooed me away since I was not a passenger. Felt bad but this sort of forced us into getting out of the station and taking a boat ride on Hooghly. Sunset, great breeze, two bridges......Bliss! I felt satisfied.
Did not do much after wednesday, came back to Madras on Friday...home sweet home. I promised myself that I would spend more time in Kolkata the next time round.
