Calcutta offers will never think of disowning the city

Something that can never happen in any other place on this planet can easily happen in this city, Calcutta or today's Kolkata. Real and unreal, cruelty and affection, terrible indifference and unnecessary concern all await silently at every nook and corner of this city. Anybody who has discovered this and absorbed this absurdity that Calcutta offers will never think of disowning the city. It changes your rationale, your attitude towards living and your sense of identifying between reality and magic! In this very city I have seen men and women walking by and cars buses and rickshaws driving by a dead man's body which was probably still warm, and at the same time I have seen a school boy helping three blind beggars to cross a busy Calcutta road.When I first came to this city as a college student I was amazed by these paradoxes. I grew up in various parts of India, mostly in small townships. My father was an Indian Railways doctor and was transferred to a different place after every two or three years, so, when I started getting associated with this city I looked at it from a third person's point of view. Even now, after sharing all these days and years with Calcutta, I look at it without any bias and yet it startles me.Around 30 years ago, almost every youngster of this city wanted to become a poet. They had the passion, madness and urge. So often someone would stand in the Maidan and start reciting his poems loudly, ignoring or rather rejecting the cacophony created by the heavy traffic, the tram and the phaetons (which were still one of the regular means of transport in Calcutta). After a while a small crowd would invariably gather around the promising or not-so-promising poet and they would lend a serious ear to him. Today, I see most young men and women of this city dreaming of becoming filmmakers. You can find a script ready in their bags. I have met so many, who have left their jobs just to pursue their dreams. I remember, some twenty years ago, a man was arrested for stealing books from National Library. Later it was found that he had been stealing books from various libraries not to sell, but to read them. He had a library of his own. He would steal books all day and read them at night. I knew a man who was an IIT engineering graduate and then took the job of a postman. His happiness lay in delivering the letters to their rightful owners. All these things can only happen in Calcutta, not in Bangalore, not in Delhi, Nasik or Bombay.In this city, people queue up from the night before, sit on the staircases and stand in the passages of a packed theatre just to watch a Jean-Luc Godard film. Where as while I was in Paris, I remember somebody telling me, "Nobody watches Godard here, if you want to see his film go to the university."I would share a personal experience that I treasure till date. Many years ago, two poets, one famous and the other not-so-famous, were trying to get back to their homes late night. They were drunk and happy. Suddenly a double-decker bus appeared on the road, on it's way for a night's halt at a garage.The famous poet stopped the bus and told the driver that he is so and so and that the driver should take them to their place. The driver took a Uturn, towards the home of the famed poet. The poets, in return, sung a whole cascade of songs just for the driver. The famous poet was none other than Shakti Chattopadhyay and the other was myself.This city treats its people strangely. It won't let one stay 'normal', it can make you a Maidan-poet, a thiefcum-collector of books, a passionate postman, a music loving bus driver and for sure a revolutionary. These incidents, the city and its people have crept into my poems and my films many a times and finally it didn't let me stay impersonal to it as it was never impersonal to me