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| india |
| northeast - kolkata |
| I flew into Kolkata from Bangkok on February 25, 2005. I shared a taxi from the airport to Sudder Street, the main hostel area downtown. What a wild ride! Zipping past cows and donkeys, speeding buses and scooters, old men and women and children, potholes, cow dung, hand carts, rickshaws and whatever else you can imagine scattered all over the streets. It was all about speed, everybody goes, there were no lanes. Complete chaos! This was India, the India I had forgfotten. Was I ever in for a rude awakening. |
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| Above, a Kolkata street. Left and below, the flower market under the Howrah Bridge. The flowers are used as temple offerings called puja. |
| Kolkata's sidewalks are a bit of a mess. |
| The ubiquitous Indian chai-wallah or tea-man. They cook up milky Indian tea for 3 rupees (15 cents) a glass. |
| My feet after a few hours on the streets. Trust me, they got much worse than this. |
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| The Victoria Memorial. |
| A display in the Nehru Children's Museum reads: A Pleasant Surprise from the President Of India. His Excellency moulded a lump of clay into this beautiful bird in just 50 seconds during his visit to the museum on the 4th August 95. Can you believe they actually put that in a museum? It was the ugliest clay bird I've ever seen. |
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| Kalighat Temple of the goddess Kali (pictured below). She demands blood sacrifice and is a symbol of strength. Humans were regulary sacrificed to her until the practice was outlawed ın the 18th century. The film Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom deals with a secret Kali cult. |
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| Garbage sorters go through the garbage all over the streets and pick out recyclable (re-sellable) pieces leaving the rest to rot in the heat and for the animals to pick on. |
| Puja (offering) sellers outside the Kalighat temple. |
| Downtown Kolkata, buildings left from the British. |
| One of Kolkata's maidans, large greenspaces to help clean the heavily polluted air. |
| An afternoon nap. |
| Graffiti near a subway station proclaimıng that the sun goes round the earth. |
| Kolkata street. |
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| An old British cemetery in the heart of the city. |
| The busiest bridge in the world, Howrah Bridge. Over 100,000 vehicles and 1 million people cross over it every day. |
| A boy preparing a coal stove for cooking. |
| Sugar cane juice vendors at the bus depot and the young boy that was trying to sell me lunch. |
| The largest banyan tree in the world in the British Conservatory Gardens. This single tree makes up an entire forest. The branches grow back down into the ground and form trunks and roots. The tree is still healthy even after having it's main trunk cut away over 50 years ago! |