Monday, May 24, 2010

Vir Sanghvi's Calcutta

This post is an excerpt from an old article on Durga Puja by Vir Sanghvi, the Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times, who spent a major part of his life in the 'City of Joy'

Tell anybody who lives in Bombay that he lives in a Maharashtrian city and (unless of course, you are speaking to Bal Thackeray) he will take immediate offence. We are cosmopolitan, he will say indigenously. Tell a Delhiwalla that his is a Punjabi city (which, in many ways, it is) and he will respond with much self-righteous nonsense about being the nation’s capital, about the international composition of the city’s elite etc. And tell a Bangalorean that he lives in a Kannadiga city and you’ll get lots of techno-gaff about the internet revolution and about how Bangalore is even more cosmopolitan than Bombay.