A book documents Kolkata’s timeless journey

Defying predictions, the eastern city lives on and continues to inspire generations past and future
“Calcutta is a purely English city. The city belongs and has always belonged to the English and the native community in it is simply a foreign and parasitical community which would cease to exist if the English were to abandon it,” a correspondent of Englishman once wrote. But Calcutta, Kolkata or Kalkatta, lives on. Once the capital of British India, ‘the Second City of the Empire’ has held on to its unique character, even though it lost its lustre as the premier city of India.
Inspiring history
Perhaps few cities have inspired authors and photographers like erstwhile Calcutta. Books on Kolkata, rich with photographs, are not rare to come by. Spanning different times in its history, they have been written and will continue to be written. However, it’s the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the then and the now, that marks out the space of a new book Calcutta Then, Kolkata Now by Sunanda K. Dutta Ray, Pramod Kapur, Indrajit Hazra and Anshika Varma. The room at Raj Bhavan, where the book was launched by Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi, was filled with septuagenarians and octogenarians (and perhaps a few nonagenarians, too). It is they who had opened wide their family archives for photographs that has lent the book its uniqueness. Little surprise then that the function helped many to refresh their blurred memories.
Source :  https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-life/a-book-documents-kolkatas-timeless-journey/article25128448.ece

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