On Mondays, museums and similar places are shut in India. Google Maps said the family home of Rabindranath Tagore, India’s winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature, was open. Even better the opening times had been “updated by phone call 5 weeks ago”. When I turned up the house was shut! It would be open tomorrow.
The Marble Palace was nearby. I knew it was closed today. There was something on the web site about getting a permit from somewhere to visit the Palace before turning up. I walked to the Palace entrance to find out. I asked the person at the gate if this was still true. He said I could turn up tomorrow with an ID. This will be enough to enter the Palace.
As I walked along, the noise levels were very high. I recorded this as a reminder:
The next place within walking distance was College Street, home of many book shops. Most of the bookshops were selling academic books. As an experiment, I started recording whilst my camera was hanging off my shoulder. I couldn’t see what was being recorded. This is the result:
I saw the University of Calcutta and popped in there. There was a statue of Tagore. Whilst he wasn’t a student or professor there, his intellectual, cultural, and symbolic presence was strongly felt at the university.
By this time, the noise and heat were beginning to overwhelm me. I had already planned a pit stop: the Indian Coffee House. Established in 1876, the place was famous for being the meeting place for intellectuals and revolutionaries.
I saw a few tourists in there. The place was almost full. I ordered a coffee. When it came, it tasted too sweet. I left it.
My next destination was Chandni Chowk Market. The first shops and stalls I saw were selling or fixing electronic equipment, laptops and mobile phones. I saw one person with a soldering iron sitting outside on a wooden stall fixing someone’s mobile phone!
A backstreet section had men working on metal oil cans. There was an endless stream of cans requiring disassembling and flattening. It was demanding work. At one point, someone saw I was curious and asked me to come in and take a photo! I’m assuming the metal would be recycled or sold as scrap. This was not the first time I’d seen people doing what, elsewhere, might have been done by machines.
Chandni Chowk Market may have been the noisiest place I’ve encountered so far! The cacophony was incredible. It mostly consisted of bikes and cars blowing their horns. I felt I needed earplugs.
I escaped the market and headed for Kolkata’s iconic and quintessential New Market. This was equally noisy! There were stalls and shops selling everything from saris to food.
Overwhelmed by the double whammy of markets, I had another stop in the bookshop cafe I went to yesterday. The upper floor was nice and quiet. On leaving, I bought some sourdough bread. This was the genuine type that I make. The only ingredients were flour, salt and water.
I returned to my apartment. A meal was waiting for me. I joined one of the owners and another guest, Steve, from the US for dinner.
