Kolkata - city of misery and joy

Mother Teresa helped the poorest of the poor. Of these, there have been abundant in Calcutta. This equally fascinating and chilling city forms the background for the work of Mother Teresa's charity. The following two texts give an impression of Calcutta: Calcutta - a city in crisis \ "Why not write a poem about a bunch of shit that dropped him as God and called Calcutta How abound, stinks and is alive and growing.. \ "Günther Grass, was the source of these words is not the only one who has led the former capital of British India to its aesthetic, moral and mental limits. As early as the first governor-general in Calcutta, Robert Clive, saw in it the most corrupt place in the world. Mahatma Gandhi described it as a dying city, and also for the Indo-Caribbean writer VS Naipaul's Calcutta a city without a future, if he writes. "All of their suffering is the suffering of death I do not know of any other city that would be even more hopeless. "Almost every depiction of a great metropolis of the so-called Third World could be the subtitle" Wearing a city in crisis". But with few other cities, the notion of poverty, sickness, misery, death, decay and despair is so closely connected as to Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. The culture shock of experiencing the Western visitor is overwhelming - in every sense of the word, because capture misery and chaos of Calcutta all the senses. That may have helped to have television, writers or journalists probably more often reported than other cities of Calcutta - much to the displeasure of the Indians, who complain that the West mainly the negative aspects of their country are highlighted. They also saw the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mother Teresa, who by then was in India largely unknown, with mixed feelings, she turned it the world's attention on the dark side of Calcutta, and the film adaptation of a French bestseller, the life in the slums described from Calcutta, was prevented by the government at first, then demanded so many changes from the original book that hardly anything was left. More sensitive to respond even Kalkuttaner - Kalkuttaner here with the Bengali middle class and the intellectuals are meant. When Rajiv Gandhi, Calcutta is a dying city and called it reproduced the impression of many Indians, he ignited a storm of indignation and day-long debate in Parliament from West Bengal. The Kalkuttaner really love their city and take the dilapidated dwellings, the oppressive narrowness, lack of water, the dirt, the daily power cuts, overcrowded transport through the final decades of disgraceful resignation. For them, Calcutta is the Most Indian cities of all. This Calcutta, is before us today demonstrates the intractable problems of urban development in the Third World was, until independence and partition of India to London's second largest city of the British Empire, the largest and richest city in India, its main port and its most important industrial center. It was the colonial city par excellence, the bridgehead of the British in India, has been exploited by the from the hinterland, even to the benefit of the Indian elite in Calcutta. The impoverishment of the hinterland and the population explosion drove an impoverished rural population in the city. The stream of immigrants, after the partition of India by the refugees from eastern Bengal intensified. But the economy stagnated in the city and offered no more new jobs, which was already delicate balance of population and life opportunities in the city destroyed. Originally intended by the British for more than a million people, the nightmare of Calcutta today is bursting at the seams. Within 30 years the population grew from 4.4 million in 1961 to over 12 million today, As in a lake that can not accommodate too many foreign substances introduced, it came to tipping over Calcutta. The dramatic consequences of this explosive mix of population explosion and economic downturn meet one day at every turn. Calcutta with Delhi is one of the seven cities of the world with the worst air pollution. The murderous, hot and humid climate together with the exhaust-filled air has resulted in nearly half of all people suffer from bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases. Leaded as the air is also the drinking water because the pipes of the municipal water system dating back to the previous century. However, only half of the population is connected to the grid. Sewer, there are only in the city center, so that each year are flooded during the monsoon season the roads interspersed with floods of excrement. As excited every day several times a collapsing power grid by now no longer occur. Most depressing, however, the consequences of overpopulation hopeless. On a square kilometer, more than 30,000 people jostling. Two-thirds of the population live in Calcutta's official, government-recognized slums, known as bustees. For the equivalent of about 5 dollars a month to live in primitive huts made ​​of mud, corrugated iron and old wooden crates. This can be in the slums often tightly knit network of social bonds and at least a few of these people but sanitation are among the privileged. Below are the squatters who live in deplorable conditions as wild settlers in fabric and plastic sheeting manufactured homes, which they set up for the night on house walls. At the dirtiest in the truest sense of the word but it's the nearly one million people who own other than a tin can at best a dreckverkrustete mat. On the sidewalks, in doorways, under ox-cart, next to piles of rubble and open channels between rats and mangy dogs they eke out their existence. Noise, odor, mass poverty and the known hot-headed temperament of Calcutta Bengalis have made ​​it a seething cauldron. Nowhere is the mood as aggressive as charged here. And yet! Calcutta, this nightmare city, they seem to quiver with life. Optimism, vitality, humor, creativity characterize the philosophy of life of the Bengalis, and you think this love of life, in the face of disaster, to feel almost physically. Nowhere in India is partying more and laughed so intense and controversial debate. What Bengal thinks today is doing, tomorrow the whole of India, is an Indian proverb. The home of the first Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the city of the philosopher Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, a stronghold of the Indian intellectuals and revolutionaries is known as cultural and art capital of the subcontinent. Nowhere more artistically ambitious movies are made, hundreds of literary magazines, which are also read hundreds of theaters, mostly with amateur actors, an annual book exhibition with two million visitors, the vast majority of Calcutta, and very many of them, which is not a book can afford. In short, a spiritual life than in any other Indian city. No matter how often Calcutta in recent decades even the downfall has been predicted, the Bengalis are proud of their capital. city of misery and joy at small coal fires women cook in tin cans with rice, children rummage in garbage cans for vegetable scraps, mangy dogs and big black Birds waiting for something falls for them. On the streets of sifting battered cars, scooters and rickshaws rattling through the stuffy Smogluft. Calcutta, capital of the Indian Union State of West Bengal is a sea of misery. And the stream of immigrating from the surrounding poor does not stop. No one knows exactly how much population the largest and youngest city in India. At least there are probably eleven million, added every day about 2000 people who are looking for a spot on the crowded sidewalks. Amidst the poverty, the Mother Teresa on Saturday buried 1949, the house of their order \ opened "Missionaries of Charity". The nun was hungry a hot meal, a bed and dying - what it was most important - it gave them compassion and concern for their fate. The house of the Order is in a gray stone building next to the temple as the notorious bloodthirsty goddess Kali. Previously people were sacrificed to her, and today Hindus burn in front of the temple on the banks of the Hooghly, a tributary of the holy river Ganges, their dead. After calibration, the former fishing village Kalikata named, said the first time a Bengali poet 1495th From the village grew, the port metropolis of Calcutta, founded in 1690 by the British as a branch of the East India Trading Company. From 1773 to 1912, Calcutta, capital of British India. During the colonial period began, the economic rise of the city. English stately buildings with Indian elements, such as the Victoria Memorial, developed. Most of the former mansions, however, are now in ruins. In the hope of finding work, since 1914 more and more rural residents moved from the suburbs into the city. A great flood of refugees broke in on Calcutta in 1947, when Muslim Pakistan (East Pakistan is now Bangladesh) is separated from severe bouts of India. Calcutta is not only a "dying city", as she called Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister of the last Nehru-Gandhi dynasty once. Calcutta is also the center of Indian intellectuals and the artistic avant-garde. In the "City of Joy" was the French writer Dominique Lapierre, who wrote in his best-selling novel in the slums, he would have so much love, compassion and happiness as found nowhere else in the world