Catching Up
Friday, December 19th, 2008We’ve spent the last week or so in Calcutta and in the state of Orissa further south, and to catch up I’ll post some quick impressions.
Calcutta is more pleasant than I remember from our 2003 visit. It’s actually infinitely nicer to walk around than Delhi and most other major Indian cities. Calcutta somehow manages to combine the destitution for which it is so famous with a sophistication that you don’t often see in India, emphasised by having yellow ambassador taxis rather than auto-rickshaws, by its plethora of British colonial buildings, and by the very existence of its pavements – you need pavements to have pavement-dwellers, right? – which make walking around so much easier. Calcutta can’t boast the history of Delhi or the dynamism of Mumbai, but it has a certain appeal to it.
We spent four days in Orissa, the highlight of which was the historic Sun Temple at Konark, which was about as impressive as any Hindu building, architecturally, that we’ve seen in India either this time or last time (but I prefer the Muslim architecture of the Mughal period, for what it’s worth). The other noteworthy place in Orissa was the main Hindu temple in Puri. It’s closed to non-Hindus, so we had to be content with standing outside the complex and seeing what glimpses we could get, but it was fascinating to see the comings and goings of the faithful and all the activity surrounding the temple.
Having seen and done the things we wanted to in India, we decided to check out the last country in South Asia that we haven’t explored (Bhutan and its outrageous visa that costs US$215 per person per day): Bangladesh. We did spend one insane morning in Bangladesh in 2003 that coincided with the Muslim world’s second-largest mass gathering of people, and have always thought it would be interesting to come back even though the country does not possess many tourist sights in the classical sense. So, we’re going to spend a couple of weeks here (including Christmas in a Muslim country for the third year out of the last four) and see what the world’s most populus country is all about. I’ll post my thoughts in another day or two.
Nick