In comparison to Varanassi, Kolkata is relatively new as it was formed in 1690 by the British East India Company. The city even has this strange colonial architecture still. It almost feels like we stepped out of India for awhile and are actually somewhere in Europe. There are hardly any bikes or motorcycles, all the rickshaws are pulled by people running, not by bikes or auto! There are way more cars and the taxis are actually real taxis but they're very old fashioned. There is even an underground subway, trolley, and bus system. The roads have painted white lines and there aren't any cows in the street. We did see what looked like a community park with goats and horses and a tractor though. There are fences here and fancy bridges and lots of British architecture.
After independence from Britain, refugees swarmed into Kolkata. Hindu immigrants from newly Muslim East Pakistan, refugees from the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 and the Pakistan-Bangladesh war of 1972 all attributed to Kolkatas growing population. Today there are over 11 million people in the city's 40 square miles.
You would think that in a newer city with more modern buildings, transportation, and landscaping there would be less poverty but on further exploration of the city we found just as much if not more poverty than in Varanassi. We spent the day visiting a Victorian monument dedicated to Queen Elizabeth when she visited Kolkata.
In the afternoon we visited the street where are the sculptors' warehouses were. We visited their studios and learned that they were already preparing statues for a big celebration in October! They were mostly Hindu God sculptures. They're first made with different amounts of bunches of hay tied together with string. Next they are covered with dark mud taken from the Holy Ganga. Once they dry they are painted and used for the celebration. Afterward all the statues are thrown back into the river as some sort of religious recycling...though as nurses we can't help but assume they paint the statues with lead-based paint only futher polluting the river.
Next we went to Mother Teresa's home and orphanage. Her home was a bedroom inside a convent which is still used today to house over 200 nuns. Her bedroom is still intact they way she left it. She kept has a crown of thorns above her bed that she made from sticks she found on a visit through the Nevada desert. She never even had a fan in her bedroom despite the EXTREME heat. The night she died there was a power outage (not uncommon as you know) and her oxygen tank failed so she simply ran out of breath.
A small museum is located on the convent next to her tomb. The museum had probably 20 posters with her whole life story printed on them. I felt so inspired at what a confident and strong willed woman she was. I wish they had a book somewhere with the exact same story because it was so beautifully told and supplemented with a lot of her direct quotes about what went on during different times in her life. It was so inspiring to see how she dedicated her life to God and the less fortunate and was so sure that was her calling. She even said she knew at age 12 that she would spend her life helping others and by age 18 made the sure decision to leave home forever to become a nun. One of her quotes says:
"My blood and origin I am all Albanian. My citizenship is Indian. I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the whole world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the heart of Jesus."
Next we went to The Mother Teresa Orphanage. It looked much more like a preschool or daycare than an orphanage because all the children were very very young and they all used cribs. There were rooms just lined and lined with probably a hundred cribs. The nuns let us play with the little kids in each room. So many of them looked as if they might have some genetic anomalies or other illnesses but they jumped and played all over us and reached up their little arms for us to hold them just like little healthy children would do. It was so much fun but also really sad to see how many of the abandoned children were girls compared to boys. I read a really disturbing article in the Indian newspaper about how Indian women are so pressured to have male children that if they have a girl they will just leave it in a dumpster or a trashcan. One woman was not married and had her baby in a toilet and left it there. The stories get sadder and more gruesome, but the article went on to say that much of the reasoning behind the abandonment is unrecognized postpartum depression related to scrutiny from in-laws and husbands. So I suppose it is a very good thing that women can bring their unwanted children to Mother Teresa's orphanage.
After visiting the orphanage we had the rest of the evening free for shopping. As Kathryn and I have had quite enough of trying to shop with a group of 10 girls we went off on our own for awhile then went back to the hotel for dinner. At dinner we met two older Indian businessmen who ran a tea company. One manufactured tea and the other exported it. They laughed at us when we said how yummy the tea on the train was because apparently that's the lowest quality tea in all of India. We were having a nice conversation explaining why we were in India and how our trip had been. After while they started to give us a true cultural explanation of what this Indian arranged marriage is all about. Apparently things are much different in the north than the south. The south is much more conservative and traditional. In the north, teens are free to date as they wish until their arranged marriage, though it is more culturally acceptable for men to have premarital sex than it is for women...which doesn't really make sense since it requires both parties but, whatever. They both expressed that they are happy with their marriages and glad their parents chose for them. They even said their wives pretty much run the show in their households. They are told what to wear and when to be home and what to do. They said it's not like our nursing instructors in Coimbatore who have to give their paychecks to their husbands. Later in the evening we got into an argument about infidelity. One of the men was explaining to me that if he met his ex-girlfriend again that he would have no qualms about sleeping with her. He even went as far as to say that all men are like that and it is normal. He said the majority of men are universal in the way that they'll all cheat on their wives and girlfriends when they're not around. Needless to say I was in great disagreement but we got into a friendly debate about it and agreed to disagree. At about 10:15 both men got phone calls and walked away from the table. When they came back they were rushed to leave and thanked us for talking to them. We assumed their wives must have called and whipped them into shape, thank goodness, somebody's got to. Before leaving they both made it a point to express that we were the first genuinely nice and honest Americans they had met. Their perspective of American tourists is that they're all rude, think they're entitled to anything and everything and they definitely don't waste any time talking with Indians let alone trying to learn about their culture. We thanked them for their refreshing (somewhat) honesty about Indian culture and they were on their way. It seems even more clear to me now that Indian arranged marriages are not for love at all. They are to gain social status or gain money or obtain a certain hierarchy. Getting married here is just about procreating (hopefully a male) and then making sure your children are successful and procreate too. Love isn't a requirement. Soul mates aren't real. Nobody seems to mind.
On that note, were off to bed for tomorrow we have a flight from Kolkata to Mumbai, a 4 hour layover, flight from Mumbai to Kochin, and then a 2 hour drive to our hotel in jungle of Kerala. More tomorrow!
A sculptor
Mother Teresa's tomb
"You can do no great things. You can do small things with great love." Mother Theresa
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