Week Three (Pictures)

The view out of my window. While my room looks dark it actually gets a lot of light and is pretty large and square, a little bit of space to call my own in this squishilly suffocating city.

The building outside of this window, replete with crow. In Kolkata there are pretty much no birds besides crows, and they survive because they eat everyone's trash. They also make thumping noises on my veranda and wake me up in the morning. Since when do birds thump? Apparently, that's how things work in Kolkata.

Standing on my veranda you see the other buildings in my neighborhood. Everyone leaves their doors open so I catch glimpses of people eating dinner very often. These dinners are often highly unromantic candle-lit affairs due to constant evening time power outages ie. load shedding.

In the evenings and around lunch time the sobji owallah (vegetable guy) sells a large amount of familiar and mysterious vegetables. The two sons (I think) of the head owallah think we're pretty funny foreigners but are actually quite nice, helping us out and never gouging. They're also there in the morning, joined by a phul owallah (fruit guy) who rarely has ripe bananas, but he's always there even if its pouring, so at least he's dependable. Also, even if he has no bananas he always has mangoes and guavas, the latter being a fruit that after a while I've come to strangely actually like eating.

In India, verandas are key, though because Bangla has no 'v' letter, one might be inclined to call them berandas, maybe...

My institute, a classy affair most definitely. In this picture there is also a hand rickshaw owallah, a point of contention here. While bike rickshaws were made illegal and replaced by autos (think of a motorcycle with a box built onto it so you end up with a wee three-wheel car) these rickshaws, despite being heavily criticized as a symbol of Kolkata's huge disparity in socio-economic standing and an instrument of human abuse at the hands of economic demand and a difficult job market, have persisted. Practically, they actually remain one of the few ways to get transported through monsoon-time waterlogged streets that like mine end up with a foot or two (at least) of water making the road impossible or at least highly difficult to navigate through any other means besides these rickshaws or an incredibly slow kind of gliding walk that I picked up the first bad rain. The key is moving your foot primarily horizontally at all times so water glides through flip flops rather than tearing them off and maintaining one's upright center of gravity upon encountering sudden dips under dark and murky waters. This is an excuse for looking feeble and kind of stupid while trudging through the river-y street.

Another shot of the building which houses the institute, on its 2nd and 3rd floors. you can see the sludge line on the wall from past flooding and also just the constant grime-goo that ends up on everything here. The writing on the wall reads "Briged Cholun". While "Cholun" is a polite way of saying "You should go" I have absolutely no idea what "Briged" means... probably some store of things, probably things I have no desire to own.

This is the actual entrance to the building. It is just darling. The cabs here all have this old-timey thing going on, though I rarely take them due to the hassle of having to haggle and make sure he's not taking you on a circuitous route if you're going by the meter, and even if you make it fair they're still slower and way more expensive than going by foot/rickshaw/subway. Yes, there is a subway here which is actually kind of nice, though it closes pretty early at night, has only one line running north/south, and is one of the smelliest and most crowded subways I've ever been on, even worse than Delhi. Though I feel that taking public transportation here as a bideshi (foreigner, and the word that first comes to mind nowadays when considering my relative identity) gives me a bit of street cred. Or so I can hope.

The 'lounge' in the institute, one of my most favorite rooms I've ever encountered. Despite the fact that puddles of water snake their way across the floor with the least bit of rain and there's a constant din of honking and yelling from outside there's definitely a regal colonialist flair to it that I really enjoy quite a bit. This is a good place to enjoy one's daily daal-bhat (lentils and rice along with whatever else you're eating at lunchtime).

There is a pretty massive park in central Kolkata, and after dealing with a subway ride and a few minutes navigating along the street that forms the primary tourist hub of the city, and thus its ensuing hawkers, it is actually kind of amazing. The oppressive noise of the city slowly ebbs into a murmur. There is a lot of empty space and dirt paths winding around creaky old cricket stadiums and 'sports clubs'. There is also a big field where the primary activity seems to be pasturing horses. I haven't seen horses until I went here, so who knows what they're used for in this city.

While I didn't go inside this here is one of the more famous buildings in the city, the Victoria Memorial, a symbol of the British Raj now kept up as a museum that at least in part is meant to convey the hardships of Indian life under Colonial control. One day I'll go when I'm feeling more like a couple hours of historical wanderings, but the 150 rs. foreigner admission price, especially in contrast to the 10 rs. Indian citizen ticket, was a turn of. This disparity of pricing poses a problem with seeing anything of historical/sight-seeing value here, especially if being paid a stipend that while geared towards funding an upper-end Indian lifestyle, is still meant to provide for a relatively Indian rather than American budget.

This man passed me on a pathway somewhere in the South-Western portion of the park, despite his number of tins. Though, I was walking slowly at this point, trying to learn how not to sweat in the humidity here (It may be possible to learn this as a skill, yes?). He just had so many tins, an aspect that made me want a picture incredibly. I was thinking about asking about taking his picture, but while knowing the words for "can I", "your", and "picture" I had no idea if the appropriate verb would be "take". If there is anything I've learned in this language program is that these kind of verbs are highly idiomatic and vary incredibly from language to language. For example, in Bengali, one's eats both a cigarette and a kiss, and eating up becomes eating take. And so on...

This is a memorial for something.... probably army related due to its closeness to the military base quaintly placed right next to the central city park. I just enjoy the odd soviet-futurist aspect that many of these things take on here.

This was only one of the more emotional statues that are built up throughout the park without rhyme or reason, frequently surrounded by weeds or fetid waters. While taking the picture a dog scampered out of the odd pen-like fencing. He was rather cute and had a demeanor that suggested he had done something wrong and was not proud of it. I do not know what he was thinking at the time

After becoming fairly lost within a pocket of the city that was constituted primarily of giant banking buildings and an inordinate amount of street food (not bad, despite a banana owallah who tried to rip me off hilariously, to the point where even he couldn't keep a straight face. He did not succeed, by the way) I finally found the bank of the Hoogly, a river that is somehow connected to the Ganges and therefore has the whole ghat/bathing thing going for it. However, like all rivers running through cities in India, it was quite foul and fairly inaccessible due to fences, crowds of people bathing within the confines of confusingly purposed arch-ish structures, the Flotel (a floating hotel! To think of the pleasures it might provide!) and several dozen poojah buses lined up to take people to what appeared to be every city in this country. However, the stillness was kind of novel for this city and the tugboats were pretty cheerful.

There were a number of these old-style row boats going up and down the river, an interjection of traditional technology and a totally different pace in a city that seems to be so desperately trying to escape these old methods and objects. But, despite the city's ballooning size and conscious disregard of so many old mores, the huge economic variation keeps things like these boats a constant feature of this city, making an odd mish-mash of centuries of different technologies, bound to a class system.