I arrived in India February 8th, first stop Kolkata. I had planned my route through India long before I arrived - I based the path mostly on weather and ease of travel since I didn't want to have to backtrack. I was also thinking that I'd be volunteering at the Mother Teresa home for the Destitutes and Dying- something I'd wanted to do for years, so I was looking forward to going to Kolkata in spite of my still-splinted wrist and virtually useless right arm.
The ride from the airport was amazing -amazing that nobody got hurt as it was just pure chaos; so many people and cars going in any direction as if blowing the horn made it o.k. to head straight into oncoming traffic. Kolkata is a huge city - I managed to spend 8 days there, most of the time I think I was walking around in circles. It's easy to get lost because there are narrowed lanes choked with cars, rickshaws, carts, cows, motorcycles, and people - people carrying huge packages on their heads, people bathing or washing dishes at the curbside water pumps, food stalls, merchant stalls, sidewalk barbers wielding straight razors, cobblers mending shoes, and then the ever present beggars and street urchins - just an endless variety of vignettes. It was all fascinating, and I walked around lost in a daze for days. After awhile, though, the amazement turned into a sort of numbness or sensory overload - it was too much - too much poverty, trash, pollution, too many hungry animals, too many gorgeous old building falling to ruin. The alternative isn't much better - the new Kolkata is ushering in faceless glass buildings, gated communities, malls, chain stores. Roads are being widened and overpasses are being built; to do this they are tearing up the sidewalks so people are forced to walk in the road with the crazy traffic, but the old Calcutta continues on in spite of it all - "progress" just seems to be making life a lot harder for most people.
I didn't get to volunteer at the Mother Teresa hospice as it was under renovation and closed; I wouldn't have been very useful anyway, due to the fractured wrist problem. Also, I got initiated to a whole new set of germs and was sick for a couple of days. By the time I left, I was craving CLEAN - clean air, clean food, clean water, clean streets. But I'm not sorry for going to Kolkata; if I had it to do over again though, I wouldn't have gone there first. It's intense and over-the-top, interesting but so incredibly polluted.
