Going, going... not yet gone!

Victor Brothers, in central Park Street, is one of Calcutta's most famous auction houses. This place has been here forever, it seems, dealing in everything from antique furniture and memorabilia to jewellery and art. So, of course, yours truly decided to 'strike a pose' - for the right price! :)


Of course, when I went there, the shutters of the auction house were down, but I managed to get some neat snaps through the black shutters and the musty glass. Some interesting snaps, I thought.

Rock n Roll!

I'm making that scary face because I'm about to devour a double-egg-couble-chicken kati roll at Park Street's famous Hot Kati Roll stall. It's about an eight inch long, three inch fat roll, wrapped in a greasy paratha, stuffed with egg, onions, capsicum, chillis, heaps of chicken, driping with all sorts of sauces, and tasting like apiece of spicy, sexy (fattening!) heaven. Nothing like Calcutta's greasy streetfood anywhere else in the cuntry! :)

Kusum Rolls, up there, is also infamous on Park Street. Right in front of the notorious Karnani Mansions, which is a reputed hell-hole of drug-addicts and pushers, pimps and hookers, this place attracts quite a good number of customers from the offices and colleges around Park Street.

The Park

Welcome to the Park, Calcutta. One of Calcutta's most famous and earliest five-star hotels, the Park was also single-handedly responsible for introducing the pub/ discotheque culture to Cal. It's discotheque, Tantra, and pub, Some Place Else, are still one of the most rocking nightspots in the city. New entrants, like the ultra-posh lounge bar here, Roxy's, are carrying on the Park tradition. :)

Oops, and yes, at night, the loooong portico of the Park does have some pimps shuffling about, offering you 'college girls' - English Honours students are supposed to be the priciest, for whatever reason! :)

For some reason, they have these two idols of Karthik and Saraswati, in traditional dhhaaker shaaj, at the entrance of Tantra, all aglow in a weird blue light! :)

O, and if you come in the mornings, you can't miss the gigantic Oxford Book Store here, under the portico. Very expansive and very sexy, if you're a book-person. :)

Go Fish!

Observe. The fisherman pants from the land of eternal sunshine, Goa. OK, so that was cornily put and those are pink pants (magenta!) which go around your butt and you draw the ends of the string together to put it all in one piece. Devilishly comfortable. Though the family hates it. I love the fisherman look.

Perfect for a nice lazy Sunday brunch, na?

(O, and yes, that;s my messy room, complete with 6 foot narcissistic mirror, loads of books and photo frames and painted mango crates with clothes inside.)

Remake of the Decade!

Flury's on Park Street was always a city landmark for the fashionable and the tasteful and the jetset. Only thing, it used to be a tattered part of history-landmark, and more of a place where you would go to remember the 'good ole days' of Flury's gone by. The waiters were terribly slow and hard of hearing, the paint was peeling off, but the mergingues-with-cream was still one-of-a-kind, as was Flury's itself. But again - it was a visit merely for the sake of a nod to history.

So, imagine my utter surprise when I set foot inside the all-new Flury's, the other day. The old world charm is still there, but the paint is spic-and-span, the waiters are amazingly crisp and know their fare well, the food is as good as ever, and there is an air of newfound prosperity. No more, the old visit at the end of which you left feeling sad...

Flury's was spankin' new! ... and shining...!


So, on my first visit there with Premankur the other day, I ordered old favourites Viennese coffee (they don't make it like this anywhere else, oustide Vienna, trust me!) and their trademark chocolate boat. The meringues are off the menu though, but these two were more than enough to make me not feel sooo sad! :)

And while I took some nice snaps of the chandeliers overhead and the interesting mosaic tiling on the wall panels, I also noticed their Easter Bunny is out - time for some de-lish Easter eggs too! :)



Premankur and I took these snaps because we are - quite simply - "vain morons". It's a private joke! :) But we look damn great at Flury's! :)


While the new Flury's has a new tagline also - Five Generations of Fine Confection - this is upheld in their new centre: T3, or The Tea Table, across the street from it. This is where they've shifted all the old furniture - and even the old waiters. As my uncle said, T3 is where the old-timer customers of Flury's go - to go back to the old days when they snapped at the waiters and whiled away centu

Odd One Out!

The LIC Building at B.B.D. Bagh up there. And I don't know which gate I'm posing in front of, down there. No, it's not the LIC building. :)

All about the money... dum dum dadada... :)

Talking about grand old buildings in the City of Palaces, the first in-depth snap session was the Old Currency Office. Gorgeous green shutters, like the ones we have at our home - yea yea, we have one of those old mansions to live in ourselves - and a great door emblazoned with the Asoka's Lions emblem, and i just had to pose for one. :)

Old Guns and Older Buildings

While the first stop of my Homecoming Tour (a la Kylie *grin*) was the Esplanade metro stop and Raj Bhawan, my blog buddy and city guide Premankur walked me over to the Ordinance Factory (up above), and from there we hotfooted it to Dalhousie Square, also called B.B.D. Bagh in central Calcutta.

As Premankur would tell you, I am quite the camera hog. But then, you already witnessed that with the Delhi trip. :)

So while we were traipsing around, chitchatting about how nonsensical a Bong I am, and taking snaps of countless verandahs and porticos and pillars and buildings, there were also loads of dear ole livinghigh and his pearly-whites.

Gateway To/Of India

Always used to get confused between the Gateway of India here and Delhi's India Gate. That is, till I actually lived in Delhi for some time in 2004, and that settled matters. Fell in love with India Gate, after having spent some memorable moments there, but Gateway here in Bombay has caught me off guard with awe at times too. It's the whole BIG thing, as silly as it sounds. The idea of royalty and all that jazz. Yes yes, everyone knows that the Gateway was built by the British Indian government to commemmorate the visit of the Prince of Wales (George his name was then, I think, current Queen Elizabeth's dad), and thereafter, all the action shifted to Delhi which displaced Calcutta to become the new capitol of India


So as you can see, while being an absolute egoist, I find history quite fascinating! :)

Like the Madonna Song - Shutter Speed!

It's like the words in that Madonna song - faster than a speeding ray of light... Welcome to the fast world of Bombay. Where traffic doesn't quite move as fast as work timetables do. And where the mind works faster than clockwork. :) Rat race? Yes, but still somehow, transcends that.

It's all about shutter speed, I guess.

Goa - circa April 2006

Posting Goa pics from last year here, even though they were taken by a good ole automatic camera (my ooooold Vivitar which is sadly knocked up now), and then scanned. That's me at Anjuna Beach, very near the Zoori's bar, which we discovered much later in Jan 2007. In April, Rahul and I decided to hop skip and run away from work for a looong weekend. So there I was, avoiding my then-boss' phone call about some stupid Ambani press conference on a Sunday (murderous!) and laying back down to sip beer and eat fish steak. :)


I loved this trip, cuz we travelled soooo much. Rahul and I hired a teeny Kinetic, and travelled almost all across North Goa with it - doing all the stretches of beach, and down over to Panjim and Dona Paula. Old Goa, too - that's me in front of St Xavier's Basilica. Bought a pretty green rosary for grandmum here, and an exquisitely small statuette of Mother Mary for a love affair that's now gone sour.

I still have Mother Mary, though. :)

On Duty

That's the place where I work. My first innings in the world of Public Relations. Something that I thought I'd totally hate, while I was playing journo, but hey lookie lookie, I'm kinda getting the hang of things here! For those not in the know, I'm doing a tightrope act at the company called Investor Relations, which involves way too much strategizing than is good for my blood pressure. But, hell, I'm 25, and I love it! :)



The J.B. Petit Building sits bang on Khadi Bhawan Chowk on Fort, which leads into my office lane. The building is this great big old hulk, now occupied by HSBC, built by the J.B. Petit Fund. Aaa, those rich ole Parsis and their trust funds! :) Behind the office building, is the J.N. Petit School For Girls. The archways are amazing to get lost in.


... And that is the Khadi Bhawan itself, down there. Took a close pic of some of the designwork on the huge pillars, and that's put up there. The KB is basically where you can get all those over-priced pieces of Indian culture you would love to sell off in a flea market somewhere in the US. And then, they'd be bought by a Las Vegas bordello! :)

Naaaa.... don't listen to me. They actually have some pretty nice stuff inside: picture a great big hall, very stuffy, feeling like air hasn't circulated in there for months, and all that is punctuated by these displays (clothes, statues, etc) with pink price tags that scream BLOODY MURDER.

Fly High at Kaala Ghoda

That contraption was labelled the Amchi Autocoptook, a highly creative individual's vision of what it would take to bypass the traffic in South Bombay - convert the humble zigzaggity auto rickshaw of the suburbs into a chopper that would evade the potbellied havaldars of the island city and help us reach our destinations on time... ingenious!

I'm Quackers about it! Green wooden duck for sale at a stall at the Festival.

The city's going to the dogs! An initiative to protest the rampant killing of street dogs in the city - the artists are arguing for compassion here. Methinks they should come to Parel post 3 am - the dogs here are so rabid that the last thing on your mind is compassion! (aaa, but then, I am the Pigeon Killer! *grin*)

Steel Dabbas. Part of the 'Bombay Project', you have steel bicycles with gleaming steel dabbas handpainted in reds and blues. You won't see too many dabbawallas on the roads carting these babies around, though!

Light up my trees... Pretty coloured lanterns hanging up there - very much for sale, and very much pricey. :) So says the cheapskate.