BLOG 12 - KOLKATA - FOOD AND MOVIES - A Gastronomical Delight
- ranganathanblog
- Feb 13, 2022
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 23, 2022
Blog 12
This blog is about the more pleasant times of my stay in Calcutta, encompassing what I enjoyed - food and movies. Having come from a home where the fare was simple - unless it was a festival - I was akin to an elephant in a sugarcane field.
Even today, more than 50 years later, I consider those four years my 'coming-of-age' years, as I indulged in placating my curious palate and tongue.
And, I became fond of movies.
Those four years fleetingly passed by, to be replaced by a rather monastic life of a sailor, who ate what was served by the cook and found entertainment in tracing pipelines and, later, finding solutions to mechanical problems. One never got back to the innocence of those four years.
50 years down the line, after retiring from the sea, one cannot replicate and yearn for those same indulgences for health reasons - Diabetes, BP, Ulcers and what not.
And, having worked in an Engine Room for forty or so years, one's hearing is around 40%. So, to watch a movie or watch a cricket match on TV, one has to turn up the volume to listen to the dialogue or commentary. A Censor Board with veto powers then comes into action.
So, back to the monastic life of yesteryear.
"Mai aur meri tanhaayi"
Chapter 7 - Food and Movies
Batchmates became lifelong friends. Having been thrust into a predominantly Bengali atmosphere, I quickly learnt to speak Bengali. Quite a number of them were local boys, who would go home for a few hours every weekend – everyone had to return to the hostel by 10 PM. Prior to coming to Calcutta, I knew only English and Tamil and a smattering of Telugu.
In the initial months of my First year, to escape ragging or chores that would be thrust upon me were I to remain in the hostel during ‘City Leave’ over the weekends, I would travel on an overflowing 12C bus - to Esplanade (or Chowringhee, as is now known) and walk around Esplanade, Bentick Street or whatever road takes my fancy.
The bus journeys were a terror in most ways, with passengers hanging on by a toe hold or a finger hold, the bus listing precariously to the port side, with shouted request of “amee yehkane namte hobe”, to get down from the bus.
Juggling with limited resources, my eating spots were restricted to Madras Café (then next to Metro Theatre) for some South Indian food, their Special Coffee being the ‘coup de grace’. In a burst of adventurism, I also tasted ‘puchkas’ (also known as Gol Gappas) on a side street, Kulfis and Moghlai egg parathas. These foods alternated as a staple snack over the four years I spent in Calcutta.
As the months went by, I came to know of Ballygunge and Gariahat having a sizeable South Indian community, so a reconnaissance revealed Komala Vilas in Rash Behari Avenue and Ramakrishna Lunch Home in Gariahat. The former was meant more for their resident lodgers, so the latter became a haunt for the famished, at least once a month on Sundays.
One Sunday, around 11 AM, while I was sitting at a table, with a banana leaf in front of me, waiting to be served my usual ‘2 idlis, one vada and a sada dosa’, a family of Gujaratis – around 16 members, men women, boys, girls, small children – came in and occupied all the remaining seats. It was interesting to see the ‘action stations’ alert of the catering staff. Instead of bringing individual plates of the ordered item, they started bringing in huge ‘thalis’ filled with either idlis, vadas or dosas. 4 or more idlis, 2 or more vadas and five or six dosas were served to them individually. A 5 year old boy next to me was contentedly gorging on this, while I topped off my (by their standards) meagre meal with a coffee and felt satiated. Wide of girth, broad of hip, oozing flesh from every pore – truly a rotund family. Had they been dressed in the English fashion of the 1800s, they would have appeared rather Pickwickian.
CPC Colony (exactly opposite our College campus) was also a saviour for starved souls, especially on returning from City Leave on Saturdays and Sundays and, not having had the time to eat anything outside, I would find myself going into the CPC Colony and asking the owner of the ramshackled restaurant to open, relight his ‘choola’ and serve me anything vegetarian. He would come up with hot ‘aloo parathas’, some ‘sabji’, onions, ‘aachaar’ and tea in matkas. ‘Chacha’ used to always expect to be called on weekend nights and served us like a benevolent uncle.
CPC Colony was a rather large residential colony for migrant workers, who worked for Calcutta Port Commissioners - now Kolkata Port Trust - and provided the muscle needed for running a port. Most of the workers were from the “Boiler Room” of India - Bihar, Uttar Pradesh - both impoverished states in the 1960s - and were the Indian version of the “Ol’ Man River” stevedores who were responsible for “Tote that barge and lift dat bale” and did all the heavy, manual work a port requires.
Quite a few of them were responsible for manually transferring coal from barges to open coal piles to vessels. Most of this ‘bunkering’ was done in “KP (Kidderpore)” Docks. Vessels had to turn away from the Hooghly, enter a lock, long ropes passed to long boats, which used to be rowed to two steam operated capstans placed at strategic angles to pull the ship out of the locks into a bay and align her for crossing a swing bridge - which was swung 90 degrees (thereby stopping road traffic at either end and would clear the concreted portions of the passage by mere inches to enter KP Docks.
Here is a video link for the CPC buff.
(Thanks to Arka Roy for the video)
Practically all the dredgers of CPC had triple expansion steam engines, requiring steam, some of them from coal fired boilers. So the labour from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh had a lot of work to do.
Getting back to CPC Colony, I will not do justice to those days without mentioning the breakfasts’ we sometimes used to have in the mornings (around 7 AM) in the colony (mostly in 3rd and 4th years). Samosas, kulchas, puris, all in substantial quantities, a huge amount of mouth watering ‘jilebis’ liberally and literally swept on to the plate from a rather large sieve shaped tray - all topped up with a large tumbler of warm, thick milk. It is no surprise that, 50 or so years later, I had a massive heart attack and found I have 3 blocked arteries of which 2 have been ‘stented’.
MY SWEET TOOTH
In 1966, when I joined DMET, there was sugar rationing in Calcutta. Major sweet shops such as KC Das in Chowringee had bare shelves - there was nothing to purchase.
In my Second Year, I came to know that the sugar rationing did not extend to the districts. 24 Parganas district limits were a few kilometres from the College. So two of us went exploring and found a ‘dhaba’ which served hot rasagollas, ‘mishti dohi’ (sweet curds), ‘sandesh’, samosas and other items. I became a regular in that shop - at least once a month - to keep my ‘sweet tooth’ alive.
MOVIES
As I said, to escape from ragging during weekends, my visits to Chowringhee also included watching English movies in theatres, if I had the money. During the first three months, I just had to get out of the Hostel because of my ragging nemesis, the two mentioned before. Having been sleep deprived, the only solution was to go to a movie hall and sleep. So, I saw (or slept through) ‘Sound of Music’ seven times. So, Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago, Norman Wisdom movies, ‘Moment to Moment’, Cleopatra, Battle of the Bulge were some of the movies that I remember. Metro, Elite, Globe, Lighthouse, New Empire were some of the theatres that I haunted, with a preference for the first three. Globe was the most comfortable for sleeping.
Wandering around, I would come across the mouth watering cakes displayed in Flury’s glass windows and settle for a Kulfi down the road instead.
As the months went by and my interaction and friendliness with batchmates increased, I found that there were essentially two camps in my friendship zone, those who wanted to teach me to speak Bengali and those who wanted me to speak Hindi. There was consensus in the methodology, though, as both groups felt the best way for me to learn the language was through the medium of cinema. So, I was treated to numerous Hindi and Bengali movies, most of them classics, over a four year period.
Two of my Bengali batchmates were the serious, intense type, the very epitome of ‘What Bengal thinks today, the World thinks tomorrow’. So, with them, I watched many a Satyajit Ray classic and other famous directors, with actors like Uttam Kumar, Soumitra Chatterjee, Suchitra Sen, Aparna Sen, Sharmila Tagore – literally the Golden Age of Bengali Cinema. Apart from the brooding, intense Ray movies, I also came across an off-the-beaten-track movie of the sexual awakening of an adolescent bride, ‘Bali ka Bodhu’, starring Moushumi Chatterjee, probably her debut movie, which, I felt, is also a classic. (My Mother would have hit the roof). I do not remember watching Bengali movies after I left College.
My Hindi awakening started off with ‘Chalti ka Naam Gaadi’, my first Hindi movie and the beauty of (wish she had been) Girl-Next-Door Madhubala. My four years were interspersed with the seriousness of Raj Kapoor movies, the effervescent Shammi Kapoor and the love of Dev Anand, not to forget the heroines in those movies, nor the lasting forever melodies and songs. I also became aware of the cross pollination of music between Hindi and Tamil songs, with so many of the classic tunes being copied from one to the other.
Dev Anand was my preferred choice of heroes, most of his movies being light hearted romances, especially when he teamed up with Nutan - her versatile acting prowess being the perfect foil for a mannerism prone Dev Anand. In movies like ‘Tere Ghar ke Saamne’, he takes the genre of quiet romance to new levels.
Songs like ‘Dil ka bhanwar pukar’ - romancing in Qutub Minar, of all places. Some aficionado with similar tastes has slightly ‘colourised’ a beautiful black-and-white song.
(colour)
(black and white)
and ‘Tu Kahan Yeh bathaa’, with Nutan’s priceless expressions when she realises who the street singer is who is serenading her.
In contrast, the heroes of today stalks and molests the heroine, with a bunch of his hooligan friends in tow.
‘Guide’ was one exception, an adaptation of RK Narayan’s book, where a ‘dark’ and serious theme - far ahead of its times - was played to perfection by him and Waheeda Rehman, the latter probably giving the best performance of her life.
My reflections of movies during my college life would not be complete without mentioning the bubbly and effervescent Saira Banu in ‘Shagird’. Mala Sinha, Vijayanthi Mala and Padmini require special mention, as they were my heart throbs of eternity.
One Tamil movie of that era - Sridhar’s “Kaadhalikka Neramillai” - marked the beginning of a monumental change and a paradigm shift towards ‘entertainment’ being the core of films, as against the ‘pathos’ of the stark realities of life of the previous decades. It was remade in Hindi as ‘Pyar KIye Jaa’ and in Telugu as ‘Preminchi Choodu’.
In those days, I had several heartthrob actresses in Hindi as well as Tamil KR Vijaya, Padmini, Rajshri and Kanchana being some of them. The last two acted in the movie I refer to - “Kaadhalikka Neramillai” (No time to love and romance).
The first song link shows Kanchana in her prime, with the song shot on Marina Beach, with the backdrop of buildings on Beach Road. She couldn’t dance for nuts —-but, in those days who cared?
The second song link is a song that I had to consistently sing in my First Year first few months.
The hero is fired from his job and is protesting in front of his boss’s house. The boss’s name is Viswanathan, his two daughters (the heroines of the movie) are with him.
Please indulge me and listen to those songs.
I had seen this movie before joining DMET, when doing my PUC in Secunderabad. I had to undergo a severe tongue lashing from my Mother, whose puritanical views were that I would get spoilt by such movies. Later, during DMET days, I saw the same movie many times whenever screened in Ballygunge theatres, but I did not tell my Mother.
An interesting event occurred when I went home during Durga Puja holidays. My Father had been transferred from Secunderabad to Madras, so I reached Chennai by train. Never having lived in Madras, I would have been totally lost and probably cheated by the cab drivers, had it not been for my batch mate, Padmanabhan. By co-incidence he lived exactly 2 streets away in North T-Nagar. He searched for my home and dropped me off.
This was a rented first floor portion. And, in the opposite house across the street, lived the actress Rajshri. She used to drop in to meet my Mother, savour her cooking and both would be prattling away in Telugu, which was Rajshri's mother tongue and in which my Mother was very fluent and spoke it like a native.
When I reminded my Mother that she had scolded me for watching a movie with Rajshri acting in it, she coolly countered with "If you had been a few years older, I would have got you married to her and made her my daughter-in-law". Rajshri was about 4 years older than me. Life ---- Fate.
===== Blog 13 soon =====
This is so beautiful! I am Kolkata person and never knew the city holds so many mysteries. I have to visit the bridge in KP, if it is still there. Love the movie descriptions. For one movie lover to another, what's with our parents' censoring good stuff out of our lives? My parents would not let me listen to Hindi music AND watch Hindi movies. Lare-lappa they called both! Oof!