Calcutta

Good Old Days

Calcutta maybe morbid now, but it was the hot seat of night life, industry and lifestyle till the 1960s. Whenever I meet someone, who is 65+ from Kolkata, I am somehow taken to a journey of the city’s glorious past. High life was truly for the people of Calcutta and they enjoyed to the hilt. Allow me to write about the great old city…post independence.

Firpo’s was the place where Calcutta’s fashionable crowd loved to mingle and be seen. After independence, when the British companies still had business interest as managing agencies, every Friday, they used to mail (by sea) reports to London. That meant, post 5:30 pm, the weekend started. Over mugs of beer with huge quantity of cocktail sausages (complimentary) and steaks the firings and the desis mulled over sweet nothings. Come evening, the crowd at Firpos’s would be attired in their evening dress, which meant dinner jacket for gentlemen, smoking cigars or pipes and would dance the evening jiving and waltzing. I am made to believe, the bill-of-fare at Firpo’s was par excellence.

Till the mid fifties, most of the clubs in Calcutta did not open its doors for the Indians. While over the years, quality of members in most the clubs have left a lot to be desired, the golden days actually had members of great social standing. Even to this day, old members of Tolly reminisce about the lazy afternoons spent in the shamiana over shandy. The entry to the club was from somewhere close to where the present metro station is situated. The tennis courts saw gentlemen and ladies sweating it out wearing white flannels. Across the road Royal Calcutta Golf Club catered to serious golfers with two 18hole courses. As a matter of fact, a large part Golf Green is carved out from RCGC.

Night life in Calcutta, I am made to believe, was rather active. Park Street was the perennial point of revelry. There was a night-club, near Saturday Club (I fail to recollect the name…blame it on age!) which played fantastic music and hosted some of the best kept scandals of the yesteryear. In & Out at The Park and Pink Elephant at Oberoi Grand brought the disco culture to Calcutta.

Those were the days, when gentleman wearing tuxedo (dinner jacket) was not mistaken for a waiter and beef steak was not pronounced as baff steak. Life presented to Calcuttans of those days the best. Our generation vies for branded clothes and phoren stuff and assumes that our parents and grand parents were ghatis when it came to such things. But do remember, Calcutta had the largest & the biggest departmental store in the east of Suez.

Calcutta will always remain THE special city for me. In no other city, will you find genuine warmth in people, people offering help to a stranger and people by your side without any selfish reason. These qualities have been passed down the generations and I do hope it will continue to be so. As the great poet said: “Sarthak jonom mago, jonmechi eye deshe; Sarthak jonom mago tomay bhalo beshe…” (My life is accomplished by being born here and being able to love thy…)