The streets of Calcutta are crowded. My first visit was in 1996 for a training programme arranged for some of us officers at NIIT in view of the computerisation of the Time Office in IOC Barauni. I liked the place. It teemed with history at every corner . To be in a street with say a name like J C Bose road was honoring them as well as the walker on the street. The food habits were closer to the Kerala one. They ate fish and rice. Keralites did too. The difference was that the Keralite did plentily when he had fish. The Bengali ate one piece every day. The latter practice is closer to a nutritional one.
The classes were nothing to speak about. The food they arranged was a welcome respite from the Bihari dal , sabji, roti routine. In the evening we went about on the METRO rail. Good to see such well organized system in INDIA. The stations were named Rabindra Sadan, ESPLANADE etc. Each station had frescoes suiting the names too. It was a piece of art in tubular form running underground.
There was this street called college street. College street sold old books in neat little hutments miles on. In my next visit sometime in 1998, just out of curiosity I asked a little boy whether I can get Krech and Cruchfield . He said 300 Rs. I did not expect such a quick reply. I mean the pricing was immediate before even I could ascertain whether the little lad of 13 or 14 really did understand the identity of the book. I said show me the book and I will say. He said no. If I assure I will buy the book for Rs 300 then he would bring it from the shop a few metres away! I got shocked. Not only this lad knew the book on Social Psychology but he sure knew the exact shop where it would be readily available.
I surrendered at such pragmatism and produced the 300 Rs. He ran and came back in about 5 minutes with the exact book which was out of print since 1959. My next visit included one of the tests for VSNL when I met Indrani Chaliha from Assam. To imagine that there were young women venturing into the world from such places considered backward was sort of cute. Yet another of my visits was to Haldia Refinery as part of the benchmarking study conducted by the Solomon associates of Singapore. Once again I was in Cal with J W Kujur , my colleague of the Oraon tribe to collect gold coins for the long service award. And my last visit was in 2008 when I attended the Strategic Management Teacher’s Course Mergers , Acquisitions, restructuring and Alliances at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, in April 2008. Prof. Sougata Roy whom I had met 6 years before in IIM Ahmedabad recognized me as the one who presented the HLL case 6 years back. Recognition good enough for a lone wolf who does not care to be recognized or not!
Calcutta has sort of deteriorated especially in its older parts. The infrastructure to the airport etc seems to be the places that are developing. I visited the Victoria memorial, one of the remnants of the British Raj and a 100 year old BAR which prides in exactly that and even the waites were lethargic and resigned. The autorikshaw wallah whom we tried to hire said why there are buses to that place why hire autos? The leftist state provides employment security until the employee is bored to indifference of the customer. Krech and Cruchfield speaks about the functional selectivity of perception. I am inclined to observe certain things because of some of my predispositions as an HR professional. I may have omitted to observe many other things had I been someone else. But I cannot be someone else. That redundancy is built into the very act of writing. Such is social construction of reality which Krech and Cruchfield barely mentioned and later developed by the likes of Carl Weick of the University of Michigan.
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