If one takes a walk along the eastern footpath of Cornwallis Street – heading east from the southern end, one still gets to discover glorious landmarks of the past. The grand houses, though a tad bit has worn out, still stand in all their grandeur.
It all started in 1717 when the erstwhile East India Company obtained the right to rent from 38 villages surrounding their settlement along the banks of the Hooghly from the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar. Of these, five villages lay across the Hooghly in what is present-day
There still stands in the heart of Kolkata a social welfare home, co-founded by the city’s first mayor Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, along with nationalist Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Dakshin Kalikata Sevasram continues to work toward the betterment of needy boys. The President of Dakshin Kalikata
How about a park that mixes one of the best literary works of Bengal with generations of emotions? Apur Sansar Park of New Town’s Action Area IB is one such wonder. The park is situated on a 1.5-acre land behind Snehodiya and is an initiative
The hotel still stands in all its glory – marking an era of Kolkata that would live for generations. The Grand Hotel of Calcutta is not just another five-star hotel, rather it is a piece of history of Old Calcutta right from the plot on
Many of you may be familiar with the Bengali term ‘mutsuddi’, or know someone whose last name is Mutsuddi. The word comes from the Persian ‘mutasaddi’, meaning scribe or secretary, and was used to describe the local commercial agents of the British East India Company
The Howrah Bridge moves like a gigantic scorpion, And Harrison Road follows it and proceeds along Rabindranath Tagore had penned this limerick when the twin cities of Calcutta and Howrah were connected by a pontoon or floating bridge, a precursor of the present Howrah Bridge, now
These days ayurveda is going global, but this ancient medicine form that flourished in Bengal was once suppressed by the European world, particularly the British. In order to propagate and popularise Western Medicine, in the year 1835, Thomas Babington Macauley, President of the General Committee
Kolkata is renowned for its close affinity with food. There are endless number of eating joints spread across the city to usher in and satiate the hunger pangs of people from all socio-economic background. There is the typical roadside ‘dhabas’, pice hotels serving Bengali meals,
New Market-1905 In the first part of this article, which you can read here, we started out with old Calcutta neighbourhoods bearing the suffixes ‘tala’, ‘tola’ and ‘para’, as an indication of the predominant professional communities inhabiting the city, as well its geography, in the 17th