I'm back in India for another tour around the country. I'm not sure how long I'll be here this time, but unlike last year, I doubt I'll stay for the full 180 days allowed by my visa. India is a fascinating place, but can be very exasperating. Plus, it starts to get hot in late March.
I left Saipan November 16 on a 4:30 flight to Guam, followed by another flight to Tokyo and then a third to Bangkok, arriving in Bangkok about 3:30 in the afternoon (6:30 in Saipan). Descending into Bangkok I saw lots of water, though I couldn't tell if it was caused by flooding. On the way into town I did see a few flooded roads, but most were dry. There were sandbags around quite a few buildings in the city. After I got my hotel, I walked over to the Chao Phraya River and it was very high, with sandbags preventing it from leaking into the streets. The river ferries were all closed down. Tired, I went to bed early.
The next morning my flight to Calcutta left about 11, and I had very good views of the flooding north of Bangkok. From the air you could see big brown smudges of water. On the way we flew over the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma, a maze of waterways, and eventually over the much larger Ganges Delta. Arriving about noon in Calcutta after a two and a half hour flight, I took a bus into the city center and my first reaction on being back in India was "Look at all the garbage!" on the way into town. Bangkok was so clean and modern. I found a hotel in the backpacker section, near the much grubbier hotel where I stayed in 1979, and then walked into the Maidan, the big, grassy park in the middle of town. It's not the nicest park, but there were people playing cricket and soccer and flying kites. Also, some horses and goats. The sun set before 5 and it was dark soon after 5. Again, I went to bed early.
The next morning I got up very early and walked through the uncrowded early morning streets. There is always so much to see in India while just wandering the streets. And in Calcutta are the last man-pulled rickshaws, and I saw plenty of them. (I've read these guys seldom survive much past age 30.) Plus, there were people sleeping on the streets, a man delivering bunches of bananas on his head, and all sorts of make-shift stalls on the sidewalks. It's never easy to walk on the sidewalks. I walked to the Sir Samuel Hogg Market (1874, it says on the brick facade), also called the New Market, where there must have been a hundred people sleeping in the open space in front. The main part of the market was not yet open, but the butchers' section was quite busy. It seemed quite medieval inside, with men butchering goats and some water buffalo on sections of wide tree trunks. Very filthy in there, with dogs all around. I went over to the poultry section, with hundreds of chickens, and even some ducks, in wicker baskets. Some were being tied by the feet and attached to bicycles for delivery. And then to breakfast.
After breakfast I walked through the Maiden again, past a herd of goats, a guy defecating into a ditch and a happy couple who told me they were in love and wanted me to take their photo. I made my way to St. Paul's Cathedral, built in the 1840's and containing lots of interesting memorial plaques inside. Nearby is the huge, white Victoria Memorial, built from 1906 to 1921 and described in one of my guidebooks as a cross between the U. S. Capitol and the Taj Mahal. It is quite a beautiful building in beautiful gardens, with a statue of a forbidding looking Queen Victoria in front. Inside are some imposing halls, with various statues, displays and an excellent museum on the history of Calcutta. (Calcutta, by the way, is now officially Kolkata. Three of India's four largest cities -- Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, but not Delhi -- were founded by the British and all have been officially renamed in recent years, although it seems most people use the old names.) I ended up spending more than four hours at the Victoira Memorial and its gardens. Even had a small lunch in the garden canteen. I walked back through the Maidan just as the sun was setting.
The next morning I again set off early and walked toward the center of town, passing lots of magnificent old colonial era buildings in various degrees of decrepitude (mostly advanced degrees). Calcutta was the capital of British India until New Delhi was completed in 1931 and the former palace of the Viceroys is now the residence of the state governor. It is a massive building modeled after some great house in England and is closed to the public. I walked over to St. John's Church, built in the 1780's. In the yard is the mausoleum of the East India Company trader who established the trading outpost here in 1690 and a few other decrepit graves. There is also the memorial to those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta, moved to the graveyard in 1940 from its previous location where the deaths occurred in 1756. The Nawab of Mushidabad had captured Calcutta from the British and stuffed the survivors into a small room. It is disputed how many of them died in the airless, close confines. The church itself had massive Corinthian columns inside and the ceiling must have been 40 feet high. I met a guy inside who showed me the 1905 Hamilton piano from Chicago and demonstrated the 1830 organ, run now by an electric motor that sparked as he turned in on. The organ sounded magnificent and he showed me the works behind it. Again, there were lots of interesting plaques to be read inside. Lots of people dying in their 20's and 30's and 40's.
From there I walked to what was formerly known as Dalhousie Square, after a Governor General who served from 1848 to 1856 (there were no viceroys until 1977, when Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India) and is now officially known as BBD Square in remembrance of three guys who tried (but bungled) an assassination attempt on a British official in 1930. It is huge square, with a tank (as reservoirs are called in India) on the south side. This is the heart of the city and the tank is filthy, with garbage all around. Nonetheless, people were bathing and washing clothes in it. On the north side of the square is the enormous Writer's Building, built in 1780, but redone a century later, for housing the clerks (then called "writers") of the East India Company. Now it is the West Bengal state government building and closed to the public. I had lunch a block or so east of the square. I couldn't find any restaurant, so settled for one of the many sidewalk vendors. I had fried rice with a little chicken and an egg while sitting on a little wooden bench. Later I drank a couple of coconuts sold by street vendors to quench my thirst. It has not been very hot here, with highs in the mid 80's (a little less than 30 celsius). It's dry, too. The monsoon is long past.
I walked back to the square and went into the huge, white, domed General Post Office Building on the west side of the square. The original fort was in this area, with the Black Hole of Calcutta in its southwest bastion. After the British retook the city in 1757, they built a new fort further south and cleared the jungle all around it, creating the grassy Maidan. I walked over to the wide Hooghly (now spelled Hugli) River, which flows from the Ganges to the sea, and then to the former Town Hall, modeled after a medieval building in Belgium and now a museum. From there, after a long day of walking, I headed back to dinner and my hotel.
The next morning was Sunday and, hoping for a slow day for traffic, I again headed downtown. I found a couple of old synagogues, now closed and not in good repair. Calcutta used to have something like 30,000 Jews, mostly originally from Baghdad, but not many now. There was a mass at the Portuguese built Catholic church, with only about 50 attendees, including a couple of nuns in the distinctive white saris with blue trimming of Mother Teresa's order. I went to an Armenian church, but it was closed, with a notice about a Sunday service at another Armenian church. It did have very interesting Armenian language tombstones all around it. I then went to the city's largest mosque, with maybe four stories of prayer halls, but few worshipers that morning. I then found the old Chinese section of the city, though most of the Chinese were chased out at the time of the 1962 war with China. (The Chinese introduced the rickshaw a little more than a century ago.) In front of a former Chinese restaurant in a once grand building was a huge pile of trash, with several women searching it for something worth taking. Nearby on the sidewalks were some pretty demoralizing hovels, some barely big enough for one person, with women cooking outside.
I headed further north and made my way to the Marble Palace, built for a maharajah in 1835. It is an extremely opulent place, filled with statues and paintings and furniture. Two large moose heads adorn the entrance and there were dozens of statues, mostly allegorical (the four seasons, the four continents, dawn and dusk, and so forth) and in which the nude female form was well represented. There were also three statues of Queen Victoria (fortunately, none of them nude), including one carved out of a single piece of rosewood more ten feet high. There were also statues of Napoleon and Wellington, on horseback at opposite sides of the long sitting room. Plus, George Washington, St. Sebastian and others. The paintings included, so they claimed, those of Rubens, Murillo and Reynolds. Outside in the park were cages of birds, including the most colorful pheasants I've ever seen, deer and a poor monkey acting very strangely. I wonder if he has been driven mad by his horrendous little cage. From there, I walked a little further north to a museum in the former home of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. It was quite an interesting and very large house.
Walking further north, I finally reached the Kumartuli neighbor, where sculptors (kumars) make idols out of clay over straw molded in the shape of gods. It was very interesting to watch them do so. Many are puchased and them immersed in the river, to melt away. I met two Bengali guys who spoke good English and walked around with them, reaching the wide Hooghly, at least a half mile wide. Only a few ferries were plying the river. It was getting close to dusk, so I took a ricketty, old, but not crowded, tram back to near my hotel, a ride of half an hour and an interesting way to see the city.
The next morning I walked to the Hooghly and took a ferry upriver to the huge Howrah train station on the other side. The sky, as always, was very hazy. Calcutta has terrible air quality. I looked around the station and then crossed the Howrah bridge that crosses the Hooghly. Finished in 1943, there wasn't too much vehicle traffic, but what there was made the bridge vibrate quite a bit. Lots of pedestrians, a steady stream, were using the bridge, including dozens of men carrying big bundles or boxes on their heads. On the other side, near the foot of the bridge, is a big flower market, with mostly orange and yellow marigolds, most of them offerred in long, wide garlands. I walked through and ended on Mulick Ghat, with a great view of the bridge. Bathers were in the river and a holy man was conducting a puja, a prayer offerring, for a young man who had just shaved his head. A barber was shaving another man on the steps nearby. An old, apparently sick, woman was being massaged by another woman.
I watched all the activity for a while and then took a tram and then Calcutta's 1980's Russian-built subway south to near the Kali temple in an area called Kalighat. This is another of those places, like Kangra in the north that I visited last years, where parts of Sati, or Kali as she is also known, landed after her dead body was cut up into 51 pieces and flung all over India. Here, a little toe landed, though it is not clear to me if it is the left or the right one. In Kangra it was the left breast. The temple was not all that interesting, though there were worshipers flinging flowers at the image of Kali. Goats are supposed to be sacrified here, and I did see what appeared to be freshly butchered goat meat in a bloody corner of the temple precincts. Supposedly, in recent years the goats have replaced human sacrifices. Next door is a hostal run by Mother Teresa's nuns and I saw one of them in habit. Apparently, lots of poor Indians used to come to this holy area, and perhaps still do, to die. Nearby, is a garbage filled little creek where on the steps above it a couple was being married, the bride with elaborately hennaed hands. I talked with the friendly brother of the groom and his daughter, from Lucknow, who spoke excellent English.
I took the subway north and had lunch and then walked to the Park Street Cemetary, filled with hundreds of quite substantial tombs, with obelisks and columns and the like, under big trees. Many are restored, but are still in some disrepair. It was quite a nice, peaceful place. From there I walked north to Mother Theresa's headquarters, where she lived and where she is now buried in a simple white tomb in the front room of the building, with traffic noise outside. On the tomb were her name, birth and death dates, and in marigold petals below the words "Possessing Nothing Only Jesus." It got dark as I visited the small but interesting museum. Her bed room is preserved and you can look into it.
The next morning I walked around a bit, in particular watching the rickshaw traffic. Lots of kids were being taken to school by rickshaw. At 10 I went to the Indian Museum in a grand old colonial building with lofty halls, perhaps 30 feet high. There is some great sculpture, but most of the exhibits are pretty dusty. There is a very impressive skeleton of a elephant eleven feet high at the shoulder, with some pretty big, but smaller, elephant skeletons around him. After two or three hours I left and had lunch and then took the subway a couple of stops south (for a fare of eight cents) and walked to the museum in the house of Subhas Chandra Bose, an independence leader who fought with the Japanese against the British on the India-Burma border. That pretty much wrapped up my sightseeing and I headed back to my hotel.
I left Saipan November 16 on a 4:30 flight to Guam, followed by another flight to Tokyo and then a third to Bangkok, arriving in Bangkok about 3:30 in the afternoon (6:30 in Saipan). Descending into Bangkok I saw lots of water, though I couldn't tell if it was caused by flooding. On the way into town I did see a few flooded roads, but most were dry. There were sandbags around quite a few buildings in the city. After I got my hotel, I walked over to the Chao Phraya River and it was very high, with sandbags preventing it from leaking into the streets. The river ferries were all closed down. Tired, I went to bed early.
The next morning my flight to Calcutta left about 11, and I had very good views of the flooding north of Bangkok. From the air you could see big brown smudges of water. On the way we flew over the Irrawaddy Delta in Burma, a maze of waterways, and eventually over the much larger Ganges Delta. Arriving about noon in Calcutta after a two and a half hour flight, I took a bus into the city center and my first reaction on being back in India was "Look at all the garbage!" on the way into town. Bangkok was so clean and modern. I found a hotel in the backpacker section, near the much grubbier hotel where I stayed in 1979, and then walked into the Maidan, the big, grassy park in the middle of town. It's not the nicest park, but there were people playing cricket and soccer and flying kites. Also, some horses and goats. The sun set before 5 and it was dark soon after 5. Again, I went to bed early.
The next morning I got up very early and walked through the uncrowded early morning streets. There is always so much to see in India while just wandering the streets. And in Calcutta are the last man-pulled rickshaws, and I saw plenty of them. (I've read these guys seldom survive much past age 30.) Plus, there were people sleeping on the streets, a man delivering bunches of bananas on his head, and all sorts of make-shift stalls on the sidewalks. It's never easy to walk on the sidewalks. I walked to the Sir Samuel Hogg Market (1874, it says on the brick facade), also called the New Market, where there must have been a hundred people sleeping in the open space in front. The main part of the market was not yet open, but the butchers' section was quite busy. It seemed quite medieval inside, with men butchering goats and some water buffalo on sections of wide tree trunks. Very filthy in there, with dogs all around. I went over to the poultry section, with hundreds of chickens, and even some ducks, in wicker baskets. Some were being tied by the feet and attached to bicycles for delivery. And then to breakfast.
After breakfast I walked through the Maiden again, past a herd of goats, a guy defecating into a ditch and a happy couple who told me they were in love and wanted me to take their photo. I made my way to St. Paul's Cathedral, built in the 1840's and containing lots of interesting memorial plaques inside. Nearby is the huge, white Victoria Memorial, built from 1906 to 1921 and described in one of my guidebooks as a cross between the U. S. Capitol and the Taj Mahal. It is quite a beautiful building in beautiful gardens, with a statue of a forbidding looking Queen Victoria in front. Inside are some imposing halls, with various statues, displays and an excellent museum on the history of Calcutta. (Calcutta, by the way, is now officially Kolkata. Three of India's four largest cities -- Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, but not Delhi -- were founded by the British and all have been officially renamed in recent years, although it seems most people use the old names.) I ended up spending more than four hours at the Victoira Memorial and its gardens. Even had a small lunch in the garden canteen. I walked back through the Maidan just as the sun was setting.
The next morning I again set off early and walked toward the center of town, passing lots of magnificent old colonial era buildings in various degrees of decrepitude (mostly advanced degrees). Calcutta was the capital of British India until New Delhi was completed in 1931 and the former palace of the Viceroys is now the residence of the state governor. It is a massive building modeled after some great house in England and is closed to the public. I walked over to St. John's Church, built in the 1780's. In the yard is the mausoleum of the East India Company trader who established the trading outpost here in 1690 and a few other decrepit graves. There is also the memorial to those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta, moved to the graveyard in 1940 from its previous location where the deaths occurred in 1756. The Nawab of Mushidabad had captured Calcutta from the British and stuffed the survivors into a small room. It is disputed how many of them died in the airless, close confines. The church itself had massive Corinthian columns inside and the ceiling must have been 40 feet high. I met a guy inside who showed me the 1905 Hamilton piano from Chicago and demonstrated the 1830 organ, run now by an electric motor that sparked as he turned in on. The organ sounded magnificent and he showed me the works behind it. Again, there were lots of interesting plaques to be read inside. Lots of people dying in their 20's and 30's and 40's.
From there I walked to what was formerly known as Dalhousie Square, after a Governor General who served from 1848 to 1856 (there were no viceroys until 1977, when Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India) and is now officially known as BBD Square in remembrance of three guys who tried (but bungled) an assassination attempt on a British official in 1930. It is huge square, with a tank (as reservoirs are called in India) on the south side. This is the heart of the city and the tank is filthy, with garbage all around. Nonetheless, people were bathing and washing clothes in it. On the north side of the square is the enormous Writer's Building, built in 1780, but redone a century later, for housing the clerks (then called "writers") of the East India Company. Now it is the West Bengal state government building and closed to the public. I had lunch a block or so east of the square. I couldn't find any restaurant, so settled for one of the many sidewalk vendors. I had fried rice with a little chicken and an egg while sitting on a little wooden bench. Later I drank a couple of coconuts sold by street vendors to quench my thirst. It has not been very hot here, with highs in the mid 80's (a little less than 30 celsius). It's dry, too. The monsoon is long past.
I walked back to the square and went into the huge, white, domed General Post Office Building on the west side of the square. The original fort was in this area, with the Black Hole of Calcutta in its southwest bastion. After the British retook the city in 1757, they built a new fort further south and cleared the jungle all around it, creating the grassy Maidan. I walked over to the wide Hooghly (now spelled Hugli) River, which flows from the Ganges to the sea, and then to the former Town Hall, modeled after a medieval building in Belgium and now a museum. From there, after a long day of walking, I headed back to dinner and my hotel.
The next morning was Sunday and, hoping for a slow day for traffic, I again headed downtown. I found a couple of old synagogues, now closed and not in good repair. Calcutta used to have something like 30,000 Jews, mostly originally from Baghdad, but not many now. There was a mass at the Portuguese built Catholic church, with only about 50 attendees, including a couple of nuns in the distinctive white saris with blue trimming of Mother Teresa's order. I went to an Armenian church, but it was closed, with a notice about a Sunday service at another Armenian church. It did have very interesting Armenian language tombstones all around it. I then went to the city's largest mosque, with maybe four stories of prayer halls, but few worshipers that morning. I then found the old Chinese section of the city, though most of the Chinese were chased out at the time of the 1962 war with China. (The Chinese introduced the rickshaw a little more than a century ago.) In front of a former Chinese restaurant in a once grand building was a huge pile of trash, with several women searching it for something worth taking. Nearby on the sidewalks were some pretty demoralizing hovels, some barely big enough for one person, with women cooking outside.
I headed further north and made my way to the Marble Palace, built for a maharajah in 1835. It is an extremely opulent place, filled with statues and paintings and furniture. Two large moose heads adorn the entrance and there were dozens of statues, mostly allegorical (the four seasons, the four continents, dawn and dusk, and so forth) and in which the nude female form was well represented. There were also three statues of Queen Victoria (fortunately, none of them nude), including one carved out of a single piece of rosewood more ten feet high. There were also statues of Napoleon and Wellington, on horseback at opposite sides of the long sitting room. Plus, George Washington, St. Sebastian and others. The paintings included, so they claimed, those of Rubens, Murillo and Reynolds. Outside in the park were cages of birds, including the most colorful pheasants I've ever seen, deer and a poor monkey acting very strangely. I wonder if he has been driven mad by his horrendous little cage. From there, I walked a little further north to a museum in the former home of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. It was quite an interesting and very large house.
Walking further north, I finally reached the Kumartuli neighbor, where sculptors (kumars) make idols out of clay over straw molded in the shape of gods. It was very interesting to watch them do so. Many are puchased and them immersed in the river, to melt away. I met two Bengali guys who spoke good English and walked around with them, reaching the wide Hooghly, at least a half mile wide. Only a few ferries were plying the river. It was getting close to dusk, so I took a ricketty, old, but not crowded, tram back to near my hotel, a ride of half an hour and an interesting way to see the city.
The next morning I walked to the Hooghly and took a ferry upriver to the huge Howrah train station on the other side. The sky, as always, was very hazy. Calcutta has terrible air quality. I looked around the station and then crossed the Howrah bridge that crosses the Hooghly. Finished in 1943, there wasn't too much vehicle traffic, but what there was made the bridge vibrate quite a bit. Lots of pedestrians, a steady stream, were using the bridge, including dozens of men carrying big bundles or boxes on their heads. On the other side, near the foot of the bridge, is a big flower market, with mostly orange and yellow marigolds, most of them offerred in long, wide garlands. I walked through and ended on Mulick Ghat, with a great view of the bridge. Bathers were in the river and a holy man was conducting a puja, a prayer offerring, for a young man who had just shaved his head. A barber was shaving another man on the steps nearby. An old, apparently sick, woman was being massaged by another woman.
I watched all the activity for a while and then took a tram and then Calcutta's 1980's Russian-built subway south to near the Kali temple in an area called Kalighat. This is another of those places, like Kangra in the north that I visited last years, where parts of Sati, or Kali as she is also known, landed after her dead body was cut up into 51 pieces and flung all over India. Here, a little toe landed, though it is not clear to me if it is the left or the right one. In Kangra it was the left breast. The temple was not all that interesting, though there were worshipers flinging flowers at the image of Kali. Goats are supposed to be sacrified here, and I did see what appeared to be freshly butchered goat meat in a bloody corner of the temple precincts. Supposedly, in recent years the goats have replaced human sacrifices. Next door is a hostal run by Mother Teresa's nuns and I saw one of them in habit. Apparently, lots of poor Indians used to come to this holy area, and perhaps still do, to die. Nearby, is a garbage filled little creek where on the steps above it a couple was being married, the bride with elaborately hennaed hands. I talked with the friendly brother of the groom and his daughter, from Lucknow, who spoke excellent English.
I took the subway north and had lunch and then walked to the Park Street Cemetary, filled with hundreds of quite substantial tombs, with obelisks and columns and the like, under big trees. Many are restored, but are still in some disrepair. It was quite a nice, peaceful place. From there I walked north to Mother Theresa's headquarters, where she lived and where she is now buried in a simple white tomb in the front room of the building, with traffic noise outside. On the tomb were her name, birth and death dates, and in marigold petals below the words "Possessing Nothing Only Jesus." It got dark as I visited the small but interesting museum. Her bed room is preserved and you can look into it.
The next morning I walked around a bit, in particular watching the rickshaw traffic. Lots of kids were being taken to school by rickshaw. At 10 I went to the Indian Museum in a grand old colonial building with lofty halls, perhaps 30 feet high. There is some great sculpture, but most of the exhibits are pretty dusty. There is a very impressive skeleton of a elephant eleven feet high at the shoulder, with some pretty big, but smaller, elephant skeletons around him. After two or three hours I left and had lunch and then took the subway a couple of stops south (for a fare of eight cents) and walked to the museum in the house of Subhas Chandra Bose, an independence leader who fought with the Japanese against the British on the India-Burma border. That pretty much wrapped up my sightseeing and I headed back to my hotel.
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