Calcutta Corner

They Did It? No
While it's being reported everywhere that the People's Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) had claimed responsibility for today's attack on the Kolkata-Kurla Gyaneswhari Express (because of two posters found at the site and the manner of the attack), the PCAPA chief (after Chhatradhar's arrest, PCAPA is headed by Ashit Mahato) denied that PCAPA was behind the attack. He said that PCAPA was "being framed" and that the handwritten posters could have been planted there by anybody. He went to the extent of condemning the attack.

Duronto, Uronto, Jhulonto
It’s election time in Bengal again. The countdown has begun. On Sunday, May 30, West Bengal’s 81 municipal bodies, including the Kalcutta Municipal Corporation (KMC) will go to the polls. And Election time in Bengal is nothing if not a time of free-flowing insults with politicians taking potshots at each other like never before. For a while it seemed that the Left parties had gone kind of quite because of the humiliating drubbing that they got in the Parliamentary elections. But apparently that was the lull before the storm. At a press conference to kick-off the CPI(M) campaign, a beaming Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee unleashed a torrent of barbs directed at the main opposition, Trinamool and its party chief Mamata Banerjee. Deriding the seemingly countless number of trains – including the “Duronto” (Restless) series – introduced by Banerjee since she took charge of the rail ministry, the Chief Minister said, “I keep hearing about all these new trains” and then with a toothy grin continued with a series of Bengali words to rhyme with Duronto: “There is the Duroto Express, the Uronto (flying) Express, the Jhulonto (hanging) Express..."

By George, It's International Standard
Some time ago one of our readers from London wrote to us rather pointedly about the dearth of public toilets in Calcutta (and the astonishingly common practice of people urinating out in the open). The reader, who called himself George, asked us to tell the Calcutta Mayor to construct a public toilet at the crossing of Park Street and Chowringhee. Well, we did exactly that. During an exclusive interview with Calcutta Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee, Outlook conveyed George’s concern to him. The Mayor had this message for George: “The next time you visit Calcutta and need to use the toilet, there is an ‘international-standard’ one at the crossing of Park Street and AJC Bose Road.” The Mayor further noted that in the last five years of his tenure, construction of public privies was high on his list of priorities and that as many as 130 have already been built in various parts of the city.

The Mayor then made one more, rather curious observation. He said that, to his dismay, he found people still using our great city’s public spaces to relieve themselves, despite the presence of all these new toilets: “I’ve even seen people peeing on the wall just outside the toilet. They would rather do that than pay the 50 paise or so which is charged for using the public privy. While driving along the streets of Calcutta, I’ve noticed this many times. Often I had the urge to stop my car, get off and thrash the guy, but I know I couldn’t do that.”

So, George, if you’re listening, remember that next time you see a man relieving himself in public in Calcutta, chances are there is a privy lurking somewhere in the background. I wonder why they don’t just fine people for peeing outside, instead of charging them to urinate inside!

No Second Term
Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee is not running for a second term and when KMC goes to the polls on May 30, it will be technically his last day in office. In an exclusive interview to Outlook four days before the elections, the Mayor explained why he wants to call it quits. “In a parliamentary democracy,” he said, “it is important to allow others to come in and bring in fresh ideas.” He agreed that it was a challenging task being in-charge of the civic responsibilities of a “complex” city like Calcutta and he said that he felt satisfied with his achievements in areas like cleaning up corruption and putting in place efficient pumping and drainage systems. As an example of his anti-corruption efforts, he cited his mandate to computerize the details of all city contracts, including any deals or payouts involving the city’s various construction projects. One of the goals of the mandatory computerization program was to prevent municipal workers from getting kick-backs or taking bribes in return for releasing payments (areas where corruption has been rampant in the past). He said that among his regrets is his lack of success in clearing the pavements of a variety of unauthorized but permanent structures like shops, clubs, political party offices and even temples.

Exact Same Spots
Flags, banners and posters representing the three main political parties in the fray – CPIM, Congress and Trinamool –have appeared all over the city. Usually the three parties give each other some space and put up their respective banners in separate spaces. This time, there is a noticeable change in trend that has the parties jostling for all the exact same spots. In some areas, the party banners have been planted in the ground so close to each other, they look like three shoots of the same plant growing out of the earth. But here’s the funniest visual example of this inadvertent trend of displaying unity among the parties: I saw a man in a CPIM T-shirt, pulling a rickshaw with a TMC poster hanging from it and a Congress flag fluttering near the handle.

Election Trivia
Election rhyme distributed through fliers: