Kolkata is the renamed Calcutta of Mother Theresa fame...

Some other folks being turned away from Mother Theresa's mission
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We travelled to Kolkata to try and find "modern" India.  We succeeded but only partially.  Kolkata had a few small areas where there was a semblance of infrastructure and development in any first world sense but not really.  It was surprising really how weak the internal state of India actually is compared to other developing countries.  (Including places like Bolivia!)  There is such a long way to go for them.  I hope they can make it but there are heavy cultural weights to carry.  There is a particular kind of apathy and dishonesty as far as I can tell.  Sort of like the story about how crabs can't get out of a bucket because as soon as one starts to make it out another one tries to use them to climb out and pulls them back in.  I'm sure there are a lot of good people in India but there is a large enough percentage of "not good" people around them that the system is prevented from moving much.  At least that is what it looks like to my foreign eye.

Central train station in Kolkata. Probably deserves the nicest train station we've seen trophy.
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Kolkata was the hub for the UK in India and is where they centered their government.  The old administrative area is still there but is pretty run-down.  There was one especially well-maintained building called the Writer's building that was nice though.  We had a chance to go see the charity that Mother Theresa had worked at.  It was a bit odd to be carted there on a rickshaw pulled on foot by a person but we didn't really know the way and the guy sure seemed to want the work.  Anyway, when we arrived the visiting hours were closed in middle of the afternoon so we had to content ourselves with just "being there".  Was still worth going out there...

A different wallah performing his daily run.
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Snippet O' Travel:

I had this little street urchin clinging to my arm begging for money as we stood in front of the Mother Theresa mission here in Calcutta.  I think he has discovered if he rubs his dirty little palms on tourist's clean arms they will give him money to avoid the plague.  Well...  not this tourist!  I just kept checking to make sure my watch and wedding ring were still there along with the stuff in my pockets and dragged the little succubus for about a block before he gave up!  Somewhere along the way he discovered that pushing buttons on my watch make it beep.  So I'm wandering down the street with a filthy elf beeping along and I keep repeating "no" in English and Hindi.  Kind of fun in an odd way!  There are so many people hitting us up for cash all the time that you really have to get pretty heartless or you wouldn't get anything done.  The fact that the street rabble doesn't bother local Indians much makes it easy to ignore them.  Target me just because I'm a gullible foreigner will they?  I think not...

A running rickshaw-wallah that took us to Mother Theresa's place.
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Just so we don't sound totally heartless, we did buy a couple from Bangladesh with an infant a meal.  They had a story about how they were trying to get to Delhi but someone sold them the wrong ticket, blah, blah, blah...  Probably all lies unfortunately but at least we got them food instead of cash.  All we probably accomplished was encouraging them to keep hitting up tourists...  Oh well, sometimes you have to hope for better...