Nomoshkar Kolkata: The beauty of its shadows

It has been a terrible week for Kolkata.

First came the devastating fire at the AMRI hospital that left over 90 dead, most of them asphyxiating in their own beds.

Then to add insult to injury came the results of the The Times of India survey of India’s best mega cities.

Kolkata came right at the bottom of the list.  And how!

Most cities have their areas of strength and weakness in a matrix of 30 parameters, which ends up evening out the balance quite a bit at the overall level. However, bottom-placed Kolkata showed up as a laggard on most counts.

Ouch.

The survey findings could not have been more ill-timed. Today also marks the centenary of the shifting of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi, which many Kolkatans consider as the beginning of the city’s slow decline into a sort of monsoon-mildewed lethargy.

Historian Barun De describes that transfer of capital as “a trauma in Bengali consciousness”. Calcutta didn’t just lose its place as the seat of power, the Bengal presidency also lost Bihar, Orissa and Assam.

All the sandesh in the world could not wipe out the bitter taste of that loss. The Bengali bhadralok, many of whose forefathers had started swadeshi businesses, just sank into a stupour and, says De, “expended their corpus in aesthetics, wine and the Calcutta Racecourse.”

Few remembered that 1911 was also the year the local Mohun Bagan team trounced the British Army’s York Regiment in the IFA shield football tournament. The subaltern didn’t just speak. It kicked ass, at least on the muddy football field.

Alas, that euphoria is long gone.

But as a video that’s doing the rounds in social media proves, Kolkata can still surprise you.

Priyanka Rungta’s beautiful black and white video for YPO Calcutta chapter is a paean to the city but done entirely through hand shadows. I remember how we used to purse our middle fingers and thumbs together to cast the shadow of a deer on the wall. It looked even better in lamplight when the electricity went out as it often did in Kolkata.

Now watch how the folks at 100 Watts Design studio recreated the ethos of an entire city through the silhouettes of hand shadows. If it looks a little bit like Ogilvy’s MP Ajab Hai campaign, it’s because it’s the same team.

But this is on a different scale than the tigers and elephants that ran through that ad.

The Howrah Bridge,  Mother Teresa, Rabindranath, Ma Durga, and the humble puchkawallah are all here – lovingly recreated through hand shadows.

Of course as one well-known city commentator quipped on Facebook while praising the video: Proof that we in Calcutta have too much time on our … er … hands.

And as another friend said, one more proof that the city is just a shadow of its former self.

That notwithstanding, it’s a lovely homage to a beleaguered city. Right now it’s winter in Kolkata. The mornings are gray and chilly, the mist hanging low over the lakes until the melancholy winter sun finally seeps through. Nolen gur, that dark fragrant molasses only available in winter, is showing up in the markets in claypots, in _sandesh_es and rosogollas. The quilts are being brought out from storage and spread on the roof in the afternoon sun.

This might well be the winter of our discontent. But it is not a bad idea to stop for a moment, especially now in the middle of all the city’s travails, and remember that even the city that is a “laggard on most counts” has its gentle charm.