The more I dig into the history of Ballygunge, the place where my house is, the more I am surprised as to how historical this place is and how dramatically this place has changed over the past century. Sometime back, I had already written about Bondel Road, so this time I shift my attention to…
When I was a small kid, my grandmother would often tell stories of Bengal when Calcutta experienced load shedding (power cuts) in the 1980s. One thing that she used to keep saying is how close the Bidyadhari River used to flow from Ballygunge. Which, honestly, back then, I never gave a second thought, and when…
How come there are no forts in Calcutta? Was it not the capital of British India once? I asked my dad. He thought for a while and replied that there is “Fort William” which, being a fort, has never seen a war at it’s footstep. Later in life, when I had started blogging, I came…
The moment people think about WWII, the first thing that comes to their mind is Normandy and Stalingrad. This is all due to the constant injection of war imagery from Hollywood. People in India usually associate that decade with their own freedom struggle, thus not truly understanding the indirect effect of the war. If one…
The moment one hears the word “Dead Letter,” the first thing that comes to their mind would be a dark, dingy place where the letters are stored, which originally might have belonged to someone who is at present no more, to be precise, “dead”. The Dead Letter Office located in Dalhousie Square, Kolkata, is rather…
If someone is truly interested in knowing more about the colonial past of Calcutta then one must take a trip around the Dalhousie Square (B.B.D. Bag). I have been writing about several buildings around this locality for over a decade and my fascination never fails to keep exploring more and more. While exploring this locality…
