Memoirs: A Tale of Two Cities

The author writes on his origins and its systemic cultural destruction over time

By Nazarul Islam | USA

My late father always had prided himself with the saying “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow “. In his youthful bliss, he had loved his city that was Calcutta. It offered enchanting tram journeys, the walks on the Broadway Esplanade, Dharamtalla Street, the restaurants Maharaja and Firpo’s! There was an indescribable charm in this city, purely inherited through British legacy beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. Visitors return from today’s Kolkata with bemoaning sadness. Fast forward 2025, the Bengali Calcutta’s charm has simply vanished.

Few Indian cities have aged gracefully, like a faded Bombay film star from the 1970s still applying rouge, reciting Urdu couplets, and sipping watery gin in a flat that’s seen better monsoons.

And then there’s modern Kolkata. A city so far removed from dignity that even its decay lacks romance. I have tried pairing it with India’s two other cities of Darjeeling and Gauhati where my father had once lived and worked before the great momentum gathered to free and divide India from the British yoke.

Gauhati today is reportedly an unintentional study of apathy versus ambition. The results have not been flattering for the “cultural capital” of India.

Kolkata spans approximately 206 sq. km, with a metro population of over 14.8 million. Gauhati is slightly larger at 216 sq km but houses barely 1.2 million.

Yet in every visible growth metric, be it airport expansion, real estate, or industrial revival, Gauhati appears to leash the punches of its demographic weight. Assam’s GSDP grew at 7.94% in 2025; West Bengal, a tepid 6.8%. Between 2012 and 2022, Bengal’s average trailed at 4.3%, its share in India’s GDP also quietly shrank. A slow eclipse, dignified only by denial.

This difference has revealed itself in a thousand small ways. Quite recently, Kolkata’s airport announced its intellectual poverty through its design choices.

Aluminum and plastic panels assembled with the aesthetic sensibility of a typical storage facility. In suburban Chicago. However, Gauha’s more modest terminal displays an understanding that space can be beautiful without being grand, that local craft can elevate function into art.

Of course, it’s not as if Delhi or Mumbai’s airports are paragons of design. Much of what the PWD builds, to borrow the erstwhile phrase from another architectural context, is “mean-spirited.” Formless, joyless, and engineered to offend no one while impressing even fewer.

Most cities in the subcontinent flaunt their redevelopment contradictions: glass towers beside crumbling havelis, IT parks next to temple lanes. From Dum Dum to Jadavpur, one sometimes sees long stretches remain untouched. Nothing is being demolished, and nothing is being built. The people have stopped expecting, the government has stopped pretending.

Even Belur Maat and Dakshineshwar are hemmed in by the city’s characteristic squalor. To reach these sanctuaries of spiritual grace, one must first trudge through garbage heaps and casual civic neglect.

To blame the lady Chief Minister Mama Banerjee and her Communist Party alone would be convenient, but unjust. The decades of communism before her gutted the place like a fish. One gets the sense that for some in Bengal’s intelligentsia, decay has become a kind of credential. Prosperity would be vulgar; poverty, on the other hand, signals character.

Truly Gauhati is no Paris, but it assaults you with ambition. It is raw, unplanned, and a bit gauche. But you can’t deny its energy. It is flush with money. The flyovers are ugly, but they exist. There are no sleeping bodies on every corner. Poverty here is transitional, not terminal. The city is laying gas pipelines and building a 5,000-bed hospital. There’s planning, even if imperfect.

This dissonance is cultural as much as economic. Kolkata has perfected the art of romanticizing its stagnation. It exports Nobel laureates, but imports basic municipal competence. Mother Teresa found it ideal to showcase purported sainthood, and Satyajit Ray immortalized its gutters with global acclaim.

Bimal Roy made his masterpiece Do Bigha Zameen here, possibly because only in Kolkata could the sight of a human rickshaw puller be considered both exploitative and artistic.

There is also a demographic undertow. Kolkata bears the weight of decades of Bangladeshi infiltration, an issue routinely acknowledged and rarely addressed. The city absorbs without adapting, expanding the population without upgrading infrastructure or enforcing order. Guahati faces this challenge too, but the scale is contained. The city at least for now, remains guarded and has yet to succumb to the demographic sprawl that has overwhelmed Kolkata’s civic bandwidth.

Most revealing was my conversation with a Bihari taxi driver who had worked across India’s major cities. Only in Kolkata, he observed with a mixture of wonder and disgust, could he treat the city like an open dormitory. No city in India gives a damn the way this one doesn’t.

This kind of entropy cannot be blamed on fate. The British had built the best of the city, the ‘London of the east’ and then Bengal just spent the next seventy-five years proving that nothing better could come after.

No wonder today, the bones of a great city remain visible beneath the accumulated neglect. The tragedy is that it has become the first city in human history to achieve moral superiority through municipal incompetence.

Somewhere along the way, the Bengali elite began to mistake cleverness for clarity, and theory for competence. Their rationality was always bounded but unlike Herbert Simon, they never admitted it. Instead, they designed their failures as philosophies.

If Gauhati is improvising its way into relevance, Kolkata is theorizing its way into oblivion. If the former plays its cards right—and that’s a very big if—it could be the gateway not just to the Northeast, but to all of Eastern India.

Kolkata had that shot 75 years ago. This fascinating city was once like a work of modern art. Today, it neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason.

Read: People who travel are not lost….

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The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.