A colleague writes: As I take a deep breath of Kolkata air after a few days in London, I feel we have a history beside the Hooghly in secret pleasures and secret tears, at times battered and bruised and at times glorious. It was that time of the year, probably in the summer of 1690 when the recorded history of a city, the early glow of which was attributed to its “choosing” by the Queen&’s men for “civilising” purposes, was penned.

So, a city was discovered and all its yesterdays that were always present being present gradually disappeared into dying memories, only living now for never in sepia-toned lexicons. That life has slipped away and what remains are the remains of the handsome leftovers, or more precisely “foreign” hangovers, for we pride ourselves in thinking that Calcutta was the important city to the British during the Raj. History it is, and, therefore, however distasteful or delicious, we owe our present to it, because we don’t make histories, no one ever did, history makes us.

It&’s a penetrating preacher, the only one of its kind, for “time future is contained in time past,” however, glory or gory. Therefore, it&’s no wonder that we trace back our steps in history for we love to live in shared histories and expect a Calcutta to be London, a certain metamorphosis. All that remains then is that we like to stay obsessed and blessed in a “Charnock” city, because everything we have is borrowed, or so it seems. Don’t get me wrong, I am not disrespecting history and I say that with respect.

A look around my city and I am proud of the Little Russell Street, the sprawling Victoria Memorial and the thousand other historic architectures which remind me of a British Calcutta, as much as I am proud of Bose, Tagore, Ray, Ghatak, the nasty and dingy lanes and by-lanes and the specific Bengal architecture still visible in north Kolkata. I look back in joy reading how trade and industry flourished while we were colonised and look forward in anger to see our seemingly “decolonised” selves moving to greener pastures, aka Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, because industries are fast leaving us.

Standing in such a milieu and having had my share of history, read or felt, for yes it is something to be proud of, I often wonder if we have ever done justice to the history we boast about. What had been then was development and what we have now is just growth. Yes, the city is growing and time is not far when some remote area in some district in West Bengal will share a Kolkata postal code, as if it has no identity of its own. And yes for times immemorial the famous saying of the other bearded man has forever left us in a dilemma – “to be or not to be”.

It seems Calcutta is frozen in time on the one hand dreaming of having something like a London Eye on the banks of the Ganges and on the other steeped in the pride of its Bengali culture, some of it “proudly” borrowing from the British. And it seems colonisation never left us and I would love to believe it was so had we inherited the clean traits of our colonial predecessors who love their London as they love their babies.

When monsoon still thunders on the city sinking it, like it did in the earlier days only a tad bit less, but remember nature&’s fury hasn’t changed, we hopelessly sink too. But the British managed it better, may be for their own health, but they did it well and what we can do well is getting atop that Calcutta Eye and stare down at a Ganges at the mercy of its own people, bathing, littering and most of the times it becomes more personal. And then there are a thousand homeless who will look up the eye, may be in a distant future, and still never be able to get atop in all the futures to come. So, here we stand inviting the best of history and living in the worst of it. The dilemma it is – “to be or not to be?”