Calcutta Quotes

“The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“The Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“the most dreamless and introspective time of day, a sort of midnight of the daytime”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“History is not the annals; it’s what happens around us when we’re unaware it’s history.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“This is a little parable about cities and genres; how, while some of them lose their imaginative centrality, others take their place.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“[T]here's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. ... The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“the world’s cheapest small car, Tata’s Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal’s quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City

“Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.”
― Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City