JOURNEY OF REMEMBRANCE AND CHANGE

Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years In the City (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("The 'modern' is man-made; but it's also a way of conferring life upon things. These things, as a result, enter your world organically. What I remember from the Calcutta of my childhood has that living quality--a neon sign over Chowringhee, of a teapot tipping into a cup; tangled clumps of hair--wigs--at the entrance of New Market; the judiciously dark watercolour covers of my cousins' Puja annuals. To these man-made object, modernity, a it governed Calcutta, gave an inwardness and life. This extended to elements of architecture, elements I thought were essentially Bengali--never having seen them anywhere else--but which must have arrived here as Calcutta grew from its contact with Europe." Id. at 11.).