Quotes About Calcutta

I was well acquainted with the Calcutta literary circle since I was 17, when I lived in Bangladesh and published and edited a little magazine called 'Sejuti,' for which young poets from both Bengals wrote. If you look at my life, there is no question of using anyone for anything. I have only got banned, blacklisted and banished.

People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging

Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.

There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

Calcutta has spectacular over-employment. In the West, where we're obsessed with slashing the numbers of workers for the sake of it, we drool at the idea of more, faster computers, fewer humans. But as we struggle to adopt an ever-changing technology, we lose sight of the satisfaction that only a finely tuned human system can provide.

I see Calcutta as a place where I have a lot of memories... a lot of fond memories of coming back here and helping the children.

It was a major turning point in my career when Anup Jalota invited me to accompany him on his various world tours. I was in two minds whether to pursue a music career in Mumbai or to stay back in Calcutta. Being the only son, it was a tough decision.

My life experiences had taught me more about India and its religious ramifications than any of my enlightened friends would have dared guess. And in my recollection, nothing to be found along the streets of Calcutta, Bombay or Madras promised a better life to anyone.

Vivekananda was born on January 12, 1863, in Calcutta. From the beginning he was a precocious boy of exceptional energy. Yet his innate tendency toward meditation showed itself even in his early life. For along with the ordinary childhood games, he would play at meditation.

But if Mother Theresa went to collect all the prizes she is awarded, the death rate in Calcutta would soar.

I have seen poverty first hand. My parents were not well-off. They were in Ban'gladesh and I - just a child then - was sent off to live in my uncle's house in Calcutta.

I looked at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn't do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was.

I think Calcutta is that kind of a market that if you are a Delhi or a Bombay designer, they feel they are being shortchanged and given stock that isn't fresh.

Lata Mangeshkar is an old friend. I knew her through my father Aparesh Lahiri who was a music director in Calcutta.

All my summer and Puja vacations were spent in Calcutta with my didima and a host of other relatives and friends.

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, Baksheesh! Baksheesh! Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand. Mike said, I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops. Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you, Mitchell said. Yeah, well, Mike said, obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.

She calculates the Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past eight.

He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcutta. The people filling the platform, passengers and coolies, and vagrants for whom the station was merely a shelter, were bundled in woolen caps and shawls.

A final image: Udayan standing beside her on the balcony in North Calcutta. Looking down at the street with her, getting to know her. Leaning forward, just inches between them, the future spread before them. The moment her life had begun a second time.

'Calcutta is a pot of honey' means that in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the society became truly Victorian in feeling and tone, Bengal was a place to make money. The governor-generals returned to England rich men. It was a bountiful, lush, prosperous, easy place to make a fortune - in coal, in jute, and particularly cloth.

Street food has always made life and living in Calcutta so much more easy and attractive.

As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of Money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of sex and money

I always thought the bible would be better if there were light sabers in it. When I told this to God he banished me to Calcutta.