Oh! Calcutta

Recently work took me to Calcutta. Now no offense to anyone living there but mentally I have always had this particular image of the city being very poor and under-developed in some way. Maybe it’s always the images which I have seen of Kolkatta in press, movies etc. A few years back when someone visited the place told me it was very dirty with a lot of traffic problems. But I guess I was not 100% correct in imagining the city. They did have some certain pockets of the city which are slowly on a great development phase. There is some very modern construction coming up both in commercial and residential areas which will truly change the image of the city in the next few years or so.

Of course one of the key highlights of the city has always been the numerous “bandhs” and “rallies” which I think often disturb the common man’s life. Thankfully none of this affected my short weekend trip there. Being a business trip I didn’t get chance to do much sight-seeing but I did manage to see a few places like the Victoria Memorial, Eden Gardens and some of the recently developed portions of the city like Salt Lake, where supposedly Wipro has one of it’s largest set-up in India. I also noticed that Wipro was not alone, a lot of other tech companies like IBM had also invested money to set-up their operations in this city. Now this was very new to us who live in Mumbai since I had not read much about the tech facilities in Kolkatta. When you think of tech or call centers you usually think South India, Gurgaon and Mumbai. But I think this only goes a long way to show the great market demand for a larger skill set of Indian talent to cater to the growing demand of tech and other related services. Way to go India.

Didn’t get a chance to capture too many photos, but I thought the public transport was indeed very interesting around this place.

They use the old ambassadors yet as a taxi. The government has not allowed any other car manufacturer to get a license for this!

The very popular hand-pulled cart. I really missed out a ride on this one. Maybe next time.