Kolkata - impressions (2)
A market…
Despite my passion for documenting things even I did not dare to take pictures.. partly remembering the episode with the villagers at the Pushkar camel fair… partly realizing that I simply do not have any right to..
By pure chance while looking for some yummy Bengali sweets to grab before I go….I walked into this market hidden in the depths of the stalls by Sealdah train station…I thought I have seen markets of this lot – with all sorts of spices, cereals, dhal and more sold loose from the shops looking like shabby treasuries and where you feel the joy of realization as of where things are coming from. This market was different, though…It was not merely a market place, but rather a habitat, one shall say… I saw a stable full of the tops of cauliflower and the peels of the onion and garlic…. I saw a man grounding cardamom, another one squeezing fresh juices and a barber working right nearby…And all the crucial life activities are carried out at the same spot alongside each other. The market was full of the tiny cubicles of shops looking more like closets where space was enough to accommodate the goods for exhibition and sale and the salesman himself sitting with his legs folded… the trade is carried out outside the shops too – dramatically looking characters with the torn and worn out clothes are sitting on the ground among the buckets with vegetables they are selling…
Overall Kolkata stands out in the crowd of the other cities I have seen in India by the virtue of being so developed and so underdeveloped at the same time. Major retail brands would share their venues with the cheap Chinese-born clothes dumped for nuts nearby; modern metro co-exists side by side with the hand-pulled rickshaws; expensive colonial-style eateries compete with the street-stalls. Well… as everywhere in India, one might say… Yet not…Cities, or at least localities in those, can be clearly positioned on the continuum “cheap-expensive”, or “poor-rich”. Kolkata does not bother to segregate either…. So you carefully walk on Park Street by night so not to step on someone sleeping on the ground… and around the same area you see a bare-bum baby sitting on the pavement and then nod your head when she approaches you with her hand stretched… And you pay 3 rs for a cup of tea served to you sitting behind the wheel of your Maruti Swift… I kind of liked my four-rupees bills in this town, yet realization that the reason for them is the outrageous poverty so many people live in here… bothers…
Despite my passion for documenting things even I did not dare to take pictures.. partly remembering the episode with the villagers at the Pushkar camel fair… partly realizing that I simply do not have any right to..
By pure chance while looking for some yummy Bengali sweets to grab before I go….I walked into this market hidden in the depths of the stalls by Sealdah train station…I thought I have seen markets of this lot – with all sorts of spices, cereals, dhal and more sold loose from the shops looking like shabby treasuries and where you feel the joy of realization as of where things are coming from. This market was different, though…It was not merely a market place, but rather a habitat, one shall say… I saw a stable full of the tops of cauliflower and the peels of the onion and garlic…. I saw a man grounding cardamom, another one squeezing fresh juices and a barber working right nearby…And all the crucial life activities are carried out at the same spot alongside each other. The market was full of the tiny cubicles of shops looking more like closets where space was enough to accommodate the goods for exhibition and sale and the salesman himself sitting with his legs folded… the trade is carried out outside the shops too – dramatically looking characters with the torn and worn out clothes are sitting on the ground among the buckets with vegetables they are selling…
Overall Kolkata stands out in the crowd of the other cities I have seen in India by the virtue of being so developed and so underdeveloped at the same time. Major retail brands would share their venues with the cheap Chinese-born clothes dumped for nuts nearby; modern metro co-exists side by side with the hand-pulled rickshaws; expensive colonial-style eateries compete with the street-stalls. Well… as everywhere in India, one might say… Yet not…Cities, or at least localities in those, can be clearly positioned on the continuum “cheap-expensive”, or “poor-rich”. Kolkata does not bother to segregate either…. So you carefully walk on Park Street by night so not to step on someone sleeping on the ground… and around the same area you see a bare-bum baby sitting on the pavement and then nod your head when she approaches you with her hand stretched… And you pay 3 rs for a cup of tea served to you sitting behind the wheel of your Maruti Swift… I kind of liked my four-rupees bills in this town, yet realization that the reason for them is the outrageous poverty so many people live in here… bothers…
posted by Olga Tikhonova | 5:51 pm
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