While my father was working, we spend most of our life outside Bengal; in fact, the two years in Joka were the only life in Amaar Shonaar Bangla that this Bong can remember. But as all good Bengalis are seemingly required to do by law, on retirement my parents returned home to Calcutta. So, from 1989 or so, some of the vacation time for our kids and us has been spent in Calcutta.
But we can only visit India in summer since the kids have school during the rest of the year. After so many years, summers in India are too hot to prompt much travel. So, one tends to stay indoors.
However, in 1993, we decided to brave the distance between Salt Lake City and Joka (which, for the geographically challenged, is almost from one end of Calcutta in the North to the other end in the South). We made one taxi-wallah extremely happy because, although we were locomotionally challenged, we were not about to take a bus!
When we got there, I was struck by the fact that in these intervening years, more buildings had sprouted. Even more than that, I noticed that there was much more greenery.
Of course, this does stand to reason -- in 1978, the campus was yet young and our memories included little saplings bounded by those brick cages with concrete seats. Now the saplings are fifteen years older and many of these pictures are evidence of what has happened to them.
An unfortunate change is that there is still water water everywhere but there is no boat in the drink. Turns out that there was an accident one year and some poor soul slipped into the lake and did not come back out. Since then, the water has been out-of-bounds. Which is really sad since some of my best nostalgia involves being on the lake on a rowboat.
What are these pictures that you are looking at, you wonder? Guess!
Well, okay, I'll tell you; you don't have to cuss like a Thakurpukur gangster!! If you mouseover a pic, you will get a thumbnail caption...