In Calcutta life is what it is

 

Subject: In Calcutta life is what it is.

Prejudice proceeds us built as it is on the shaky ground of  partial understanding.

Reading a colourful description of the foundation of Calcutta and its place in the history of the colonisation of India by the British one is struck by the comparison of a business as usual sentiment in London’s investment centre in 18th century Leadenhall Street, the epicentre of world commerce and young Calcutta's expats and their generally debouched attitudes, out of sight and far away from the oversight of the East India Companies.  Young men who, far from the critical  eye of their bosses soon developed their own way to became profligate, carving out fortunes through extra-curricula trading. As they say “when the cats away the mice will spiel (play)”.

 Calcutta was a melting pot of commerce situated on the Hooghly River, an unhealthy site, it grew by developing its own entrepreneurial talent amongst the Indian population and signalled a blossoming of rich, business orientated Indian families who’s names and dynasties carry on to this day. This part of Bengal was also where the Marxists took hold with their furtherance of education for both boys and girls designed to develop a strong middle class to enhance the trade flowing through the port of Kolkata. The strength of the communist influence made the surrounding province unique in Indian history by encouraging a move away from religion and the ritual Hindu caste system dispensing instead a sense of a ‘can do’ business acumen, both in trade and finance across the local people.

Calcutta, is a mixing pot of what much of India is about. Extreme poverty in the ‘bustees’ lying cheek by jowl, not a mile away with amazing affluence. The Bengalies are themselves a hotchpotch of customs and variances’s.  Each clan signifying their difference largely in the type of work they do. The structures ranges from the Brahmin,(the priestly caste) to the Kshatriyas, (the warrior caste), the Vaishyas (commoner caste) to the Shudras (the majority)and the Dalits who are seen to be outside the castes.  Hindu apartheid goes back more than couple of  millennium and has survived the trials  of so called democracy. Elements of social equity were written into a complex constitution in 1947 which in practice lead to both social and economic straights, only by “looking the other way” could the multitudes survive. 

The stoicism of the Indian lower castes is matched by the crass contempt they are held by those born higher up the caste system. The intolerance within a workplace, particularly a government office, between those in charge and those beneath. Its an intolerant pecking order which would make any Westerner squirm  with embarrassment, used as they are to the employment laws in this country.  Missing almost completely  in the  Indian work space is this respect for colleagues and is supplanted by caste intolerance where only birth, power and money counts.

The sound of the motor horn, the demand made on subordinates, the smells and lack of hygiene, the funeral pyres and religious traditions all make it a polyglot to the Western mind a myriad of extremes to minds used to straight laced conformity. Like a Jackson Pollack painting with colour dripping uncontrolled from the artists brush seemingly relying on chance and nature to provide the effect, the collision of of forces in the subcontinent leads to conflict both for resources and space but somehow amongst the noise and upset is a sort of indifference brought on by the bars of ones birth. Captured by religious providence ones life is pretty much predestined and so a benign reluctance sets in, life is what it is.