Quotes & Sayings About Calcutta

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Unless a life is lived for others, it is not worthwhile. — Mother Teresa

If I'd never have picked up the first person, I'd never have picked up the 42,000 in Calcutta. — Mother Teresa

He has told us that He is the hungry one. He is the naked one. He is the thirsty one. He is the one without a home. He is the one who is suffering. These are our treasures, she said, looking at the rows of pallets in the caravanserai. They are Jesus. — Mother Teresa

I heard a delightful - and possibly apocryphal - story about what happened when the British introduced golf to India in the 1820s. Upon building the first golf course there, the Royal Calcutta, the British discovered a problem: Indigenous monkeys were intrigued by the little white balls and would swoop down out of the trees and onto the fairways, picking them up and carrying them off. This was a disruption, to say the least. In response, officials tried erecting fences to keep the monkeys out, but the monkeys climbed right over. They tried capturing and relocating the monkeys, but the monkeys kept coming back. They tried loud noises to scare them away. Nothing worked. In the end, they arrived at a solution: They added a new rule to the game - "Play the ball where the monkey drops it. — Ed Catmull

Mother Theresa always said, Calcuttas are everywhere if only we have eyes to see. Find your Calcutta. — Shane Claiborne

Rebellion sounded like a lot of fun, but in Calcutta there was nothing to rebel against. Where would it get you? — Bharati Mukherjee

'Deity' will be a compelling and exciting thriller with complex and interesting characters. A neo-realistic style to story and images will take the audience deep into Calcutta's many different levels. A fascinating clash between American and Indian culture. — Niels Arden Oplev

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

After Simla, I must mention Darjeeling, with its pretty white houses, overlooked by Mount Kinchinjinga, 312 miles to the north of Calcutta, 6,900 feet above the level of the sea, about the eighty-sixth degree of longitude, and the twenty-seventh degree of latitude - a charming situation, in the most beautiful country in the world. Other — Jules Verne

Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it's not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be. Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today. — Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta taxis carry two men in the front seat was explained to us later. One's job is to drive. The other's is to prevent passengers from murdering the driver and stealing the cab. Exciting — Carveth Wells

You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty. — Mother Teresa

Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply. — Amit Chaudhuri

One French ambassador, having witnessed the royal temper, confided, 'When I see her enraged against any person whatever, I wish myself in Calcutta, fearing her anger like death — Alison Weir

See here, how fresh is the air, there is the Ganga, and the Sadhus (holy men) are practising meditation, and holding lofty talks! While the moment you will go to Calcutta, you will be thinking of nasty stuff. — Swami Vivekananda

People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging — Bill Bryson

An incident that left an impression on me was the 1999 sub-junior national boxing championship held in Calcutta. I had trained extremely hard to get there but got kicked out in the first round itself. 'If others can win, why can't you?' I repeatedly asked myself. — Vijender Singh

I want to start two institutions, one in Madras and one in Calcutta, to carry out my plan; and that plan briefly is to bring the Vedantic ideals into the everyday practical life of the saint or the sinner, of the sage or the ignoramus, of the Brahmin or the Pariah. — Swami Vivekananda

Bombay, you will be told, is the only city India has, in the sense that the word city is understood in the West. Other Indian metropolises like Calcutta, Madras and Delhi are like oversized villages. It is true that Bombay has many more high-rise buildings than any other Indian city: when you approach it by the sea it looks like a miniature New York. It has other things to justify its city status: it is congested, it has traffic jams at all hours of the day, it is highly polluted and many parts of it stink. — Khushwant Singh

Faxian and Xuanzang might have been the first Chinese to travel to India, but sometimes it felt like I was the first. — Hong Mei

So in the streets of Calcutta I sometimes imagine myself a foreigner, and only then do I discover how much is to be seen, which is lost so long as its full value in attention is not paid. It is the hunger to really see which drives people to travel to strange places. — Rabindranath Tagore

the world's cheapest small car, Tata's Nano, worth only $1500. This toy-like ill-fated vehicle, whose destiny it was to look as if it had been prematurely brought into the world, more foetus than car, and whose birth was near abortive and then indefinitely delayed, this car, when it finally took to the road, turned out to have an engine that at times exploded mysteriously. Until 2009, it was seen to be Bengal's quirky but irreplaceable mascot for development. — Amit Chaudhuri

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta, up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know, there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me, who took care if I wanted ... I needed pencils for school, I needed a notebook, they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded. — Bharati Mukherjee

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment. — Walker Percy

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

These were autumn mornings, the very time of year when kings of old went forth to conquest; and I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world. — Rabindranath Tagore

Here is the full list of the banned words I used: active homosexual; career women; Third World; blacks; Asians; Australasia; Bangalore; primitive African tribes; crippled; in a wheelchair; hare lip; ethnic minorities; handicapped; spinster; committed suicide; gypsies; Bombay; illegitimate daughter; air hostess; Siamese twins; Calcutta; deaf ears; illegal asylum seeker; province of Northern Ireland; grandmother; bachelor. — Rod Liddle

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel
Covered with old gray for buzzing flies
Eye like mango flowing orange pus
Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep
Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta
Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats
Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts
Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys
Always pissing yellow Hooghly water
Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles
Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer
Nose smell a big gray Bidi
Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks
Covered with a hat of cloudy iron
Suffering water buffalo head lowered
To pull the huge cart of year uphill — Allen Ginsberg

And so I urge you to still every motion that is not rooted in the Kingdom. Become quiet, hushed, motionless until you are finally centered. Strip away all excess baggage and nonessential trappings until you have come into the stark reality of the Kingdom of God. Let go of all distractions until you are driven into the Core. Allow God to reshuffle your priorities and eliminate unnecessary froth. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, 'Pray for me that I not loosen my grip on the hands of Jesus even under the guise of ministering to the poor.' That is our first task: to grip the hands of Jesus with such tenacity that we are obliged to follow his lead, to seek first his Kingdom. — Richard J. Foster

With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar 'map' of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius. — Colin Wilson

Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection. — Bharati Mukherjee

Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world 'another Calcutta.' — Bharati Mukherjee

He had forgotten the possibility of so many human beings in one space. The concentrated stench of so much life. He welcomed the sun on his skin, the absence of bitter cold. But it was winter in Calcutta. The people filling the platform, passengers and coolies, and vagrants for whom the station was merely a shelter, were bundled in woolen caps and shawls. — Jhumpa Lahiri

The poverty one still sees in America today is more shocking to me than anything I have seen in Ethiopia or Calcutta or Manila, and has made me, as someone living in a society of great wealth and someone who's never had to worry about the next meal, think seriously about what universal responsibility really means. — Pico Iyer

Recovering in a Calcutta, India hospital. I think I'm more difficult than critical. — Mother Teresa

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person ... What America offers me is romanticism and hope ... Suddenly, I found myself in a country where — Bharati Mukherjee

But if Mother Theresa went to collect all the prizes she is awarded, the death rate in Calcutta would soar. — Umberto Eco

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact. — Bharati Mukherjee

I had played the Virgin Mary in 'Jesus of Nazareth,' and I had done 'Juliet' at the age of 15. People said, 'Where do you go from playing Juliet and the Virgin Mary?' And I said, 'Mother Teresa of Calcutta.' — Olivia Hussey

The marriage-pipes sounded, and the mild autumn sun streamed round us. But Rahmun sat in the little Calcutta lane, and saw before him the barren mountains of Afghanistan. I took out a bank-note and gave it to him, saying: "Go back to your own daughter, Rahmun, in your own country, and may the happiness of your meeting bring good fortune to my child!" Having made this present, I had to curtail some of the festivities. I could not have the electric lights I had intended, nor the military band, and the ladies of the house were despondent at it. But to me the wedding-feast was all the brighter for the thought that in a distant land a long-lost father met again with his only child. — Rabindranath Tagore

Vivekananda was born on January 12, 1863, in Calcutta. From the beginning he was a precocious boy of exceptional energy. Yet his innate tendency toward meditation showed itself even in his early life. For along with the ordinary childhood games, he would play at meditation. — Swami Vivekananda

History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched. — Yukio Mishima

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.
You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house;
and you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!
Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can't find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real! — Kabir

Avoid Calcutta's un- healthy monsoon. From June until the end of September over a meter and a half of rain bombards the city. Outhouses overflow and contaminate water used for drinking, bathing, and washing cooking utensils. Many of the eight thousand annual deaths caused by cholera and gastrointestinal diseases occur during the rains. Antiquated, silt-clogged sewage pipes drain only a quarter inch of rainwater per hour. Manhole covers are removed to facilitate drainage, and in nonstop rains (more than thirty centimeters, or a foot, in twenty-four hours), open sewers, hidden under water, become booby traps as pedestrians inadvertently plunge into them and drown. — James O'Reilly

Should I give money to homeless folks or beggars? Jesus said to give to everyone who asks. That's a tough command. Sometimes we wonder what Jesus would do in the Calcutta slums or in our heroin-haunted streets, where folks ask for change on every corner. What we can say with confidence is that Jesus would not ignore them. "Give to everyone who asks" means "do not ignore people." We can always give dignity, attention, time, a listening ear. Sometimes we give money, sometimes not. But we can always give love. Ironically, giving money can be a cheap way to love someone. Many folks give money because they don't want to have an interaction; they just want to get someone off their back. There are times when giving money can even be a way to avoid the responsibility that a real relationship might demand. So I want to suggest, sure, give money, but give more than money . . . give yourself. — Shane Claiborne

The rise in voluntary childlessness, like the decrease in fertility and the increase in homosexuality, may be an evolutionary adaptation to overpopulation. Or, since the phenomenon is more prevalent in the West, maybe it's an effect of wealth and plenty. (Having more offspring is to an individual's evolutionary advantage in impoverished conditions, even though it's disastrous for the species as a whole and has made places like Rio and Calcutta some of the least desirable real estate in the solar system.) — Tim Kreider

Descartes, in his Third Meditation, said that God re-created the body at each successive moment. So that time was a form of sustenance. On earth time was marked by the sun and moon, by rotations that distinguished day from night, that had led to clocks and calendars. The present was a speck that kept blinking, brightening and diminishing, something neither alive nor dead. How long did it last? One second? Less? It was always in flux; in the time it took to consider it, it slipped away. In one of her notebooks from Calcutta were jottings in Udayan's hand, on the laws of classical physics. Newton's theory that time was an absolute entity, a stream flowing at a uniform rate of its own accord. Einstein's contribution, that time and space were intertwined. He'd described it in terms of particles, velocities. A system of relations among instantaneous events. Something called time — Jhumpa Lahiri

Mother Teresa was once asked by a journalist why she does what she does, that is, how she is able to take the dying poor from the streets of Calcutta, nurse and love them. Her response reflected her deep self-knowledge: "I realized a long time ago that I had a Hitler within me."2 This realization became the basis of her self-transcendence and of her unique holiness. — Wayne Teasdale

In Bombay, we have a fine concert hall. I think it is high time we built venues in Delhi and Calcutta, not only for western music, but also Indian music. It doesn't matter which party is in power; don't you think the capital of India should have a concert hall? — Zubin Mehta

In a small village near Calcutta, in 1998, a villager who could not speak English sang me What Did You Learn In School Today? in Bengali! Tom Paxton's songs are reaching around the world more than he is, or any of us could have realized. Keep on, Tom! — Tom Paxton

Calcutta has spectacular over-employment. In the West, where we're obsessed with slashing the numbers of workers for the sake of it, we drool at the idea of more, faster computers, fewer humans. But as we struggle to adopt an ever-changing technology, we lose sight of the satisfaction that only a finely tuned human system can provide. — Tahir Shah

For years and years, even during the time of my first visit in 1962, it has been said that Calcutta was dying, that its port was silting up, its antiquated industry declining, but Calcutta hadn't died. It hadn't done much, but it had gone on; and it had begun to appear that the prophecy has been excessive. Now it occurred to me that perhaps this was what happened when cities died. They don't die with a bang; they didn't die only when they were abandoned. Perhaps, they died like this: when everybody was suffering, when transport was so hard that working people gave up jobs they needed because the fear the suffering of the travel; When no one had clean water or air; No one could go walking. Perhaps city died when they lost amenities that cities provided, the visual excitement, the heightened sense of human possibility, and became simply places where there were too many people, and people suffered. — V.S. Naipaul

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. — Lester R. Brown

I was well acquainted with the Calcutta literary circle since I was 17, when I lived in Bangladesh and published and edited a little magazine called 'Sejuti,' for which young poets from both Bengals wrote. If you look at my life, there is no question of using anyone for anything. I have only got banned, blacklisted and banished. — Taslima Nasrin

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"
Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand.
Mike said, "I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops."
"Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you," Mitchell said.
"Yeah, well," Mike said, "obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta. — Jeffrey Eugenides

In fact, every place I've been to in Africa has a nice part, but you see the downside. Calcutta , parts of Central and South America , I've seen a lot of dead bodies and a lot of sad poverty and just obliteration. — Henry Rollins

Bring all you are suffering to [Jesus] . . . only open your heart to be loved by Him as you are. He will do the rest. Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, — Bob Schuchts

My reasons for coming to get married in Calcutta are complicated, and it's very hard to put it into a sentence. People ask me why. To me, it just felt like a very natural and exciting decision. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Confession is something we will never outgrow, even if we become the saints God made us to be. Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Calcutta were revered even during their lifetime; but both made frequent use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. — Donald Wuerl

Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. — Neal Stephenson

I lived in Calcutta for five months in 1999. While I was there, I read many journals, diaries, collections of letters and histories. — Susanna Moore

Spending time in Calcutta [India] really did a number on me. The way life and death are almost the same thing, the way poverty is dealt with, the sheer number of dead bodies you see, it's all pretty overwhelming. — Henry Rollins

I've been interested in dreams myself for a long time, and it's a big part of the Indian tradition, especially where I was brought up in Calcutta in my family, which is quite traditional. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive. — Bharati Mukherjee

The brown toxic cloud strangling Los Angeles never lifts and grows thicker with every immigrant added. One can't help appreciate the streets of Paris will soon become the streets of LA. However, Paris' streets erupted while LA's shall sink into a Third World quagmire much like Bombay or Calcutta, India. When you import that much crime, illiteracy, multiple languages and disease-Americans pick up stakes and move away. — Frosty Wooldridge

Don't behave in a funny manner. We must have Calcutta in India. — Pranab Mukherjee

Find your own Calcutta. Find the sick, the suffering and the lonely right there where you are. — Mother Teresa

question. On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from — Jules Verne

At a distance, we see a need and ignore it. We judge it, condemn it, forget it. We don't think about it, because if we practice ignorance long enough, we don't notice the need anymore. It goes underground, and we're content with the surface of life as we know it - unwilling to break deeper ground. If all appears to be well on the outside, that is good enough for our consciences.
... If we are willing to dig deep, to find Calcutta in our own backyards, we will find the poor. But we will also find God. And He may just open our eyes, so that we can see the need and not soon forget. So that we can hear their cries and not grow deaf. So that we can smell the stench of human need and awaken our hearts to compassion. — Jeff Goins

Please don't kill the child. I want the child. Please give me the child. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted, and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child, and be loved by the child. From our children's home in Calcutta alone, we have saved over 3,000 children from abortions. These children have brought such love and joy to their adopting parents, and have grown up so full of love and joy! — Mother Teresa

The last person to be beatified by Pope John Paul II was Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003. — Chris Matthews

A saint is Christ's bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent. A saint is also totally independent, detached from idols and from other husbands ... A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. As with water, he flows to the lowest places - like Calcutta. — Peter Kreeft

Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection. — Bill Gates

You can find Calcutta all over the world, if you have the eyes to see. — Mother Teresa

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class. — Bharati Mukherjee

There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades. — Tahir Shah

Rabindranath Tagore's family, connected to the British East India Company right from the settling of Calcutta in 1690, was a prominent beneficiary of the British economic and cultural reshaping of India. His grandfather was the first big local businessman of British India, and socialized with Queen Victoria and other notables on his trips to Europe; his elder brother was the first Indian to be admitted by the British into the Indian Civil Service (ICS). — Pankaj Mishra

I can't with any conscience argue for New York with anyone. It's like Calcutta. But I love the city in an emotional, irrational way, like loving your mother or your father even though they're a drunk or a thief. I've loved the city my whole life - to me, it's like a great woman. — Woody Allen

'Calcutta is a pot of honey' means that in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the society became truly Victorian in feeling and tone, Bengal was a place to make money. The governor-generals returned to England rich men. It was a bountiful, lush, prosperous, easy place to make a fortune - in coal, in jute, and particularly cloth. — Susanna Moore

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. She said: We must be very proud of our vocation because it gives us the opportunity to serve Christ in the poor. — Pope Francis

He was proud to have come alone to America. To learn it, as he once must have learned to stand and walk and speak. He'd wanted so much to leave Calcutta, not only for the sake of his education but also - he could admit this to himself now - to take a step that Udayan never would. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else. — Tahir Shah

Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat. — Tahir Shah

Calcutta is like a work of modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility, but exists for some esoteric aesthetic reason. — Amit Chaudhuri

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it. — Tahir Shah

I've met travelers who are so physically sturdy they could drink a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new languages where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an uncooperative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal wherever they go - in Turkey they just might be Turks, in Mexico they are suddenly Mexican, in Spain they could be mistaken for a Basque, in Northern Africa they can sometimes pass for Arab ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography. — Yuval Noah Harari

It was strange to stand there in front of the mirror and see myself like I was my own best friend, a kid wanted to hang with forever. This was a boy I could travel to the seacoasts with, a boy I'd like to meet up with in foreign cities like Calcutta and London and Brazil, a boy I could trust who also had a good sense of humor and liked smoked oysters from a can and good weed and the occasional 40 ounces of malt. If I was going to be alone for the rest of my life this was the person I wanted to be alone with. — Russell Banks

India's way is not Europe's. India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages. — Mahatma Gandhi

Calcutta is like another world. People there are very special and grateful. — Penelope Cruz

Have you ever found any logical reason why mutual promises are sufficient consideration for one another (like the two lean horses of a Calcutta hack who can only just stand together)? I have not. — Frederick Pollock

It is possible to say that all of my books concern themselves with the notion of what it means to be female - whether it is in New York City in 2000 or Calcutta in 1836. In that way, my books really are the same. — Susanna Moore

The Prince of Calcutta. Two of his special qualities are his intelligence and articulation, both of which have helped him immensely in the world of contemporary cricket. — Geoffrey Boycott

Everyone acknowledges that dinner parties are equally dull in London and Paris, in Calcutta and in New York, unless the next neighbour happens to be peculiarly agreeable. — Isabella Bird