Ranji Stadium is where cricket is played. Cricket is big here and the stadium is a monument to it. Seats 70,000. It is more circular than a football stadium. Workers were preparing the field. Cricket season is nearing, perhaps.
Indians bathing in the Hooghly River near the ferry terminal.
Bathing in the Hooghly
2 of 2 million people crossing the Howrah Bridge. Porters carrying goods. Men on the way to work. Women are almost non existent most of the places we walked.
Walking across the Howrah Bridge
The Mullikghat Flower Market is where yellow and orange marigolds are sold in chains. There are red hibiscus flowers too. It is so crowded that we can hardly get through the aisle. The colours are bright against the squalor.
Mullikghat Flower Market
Two bodies, the first one in a glass carriage on its way to be buried. The second one, wrapped and being carried by relatives, on a rough open wooden stretcher, draped with flowers. The body flopped around as they progressed down the street.
A man ran past us and jumped onto a moving bus. He grabbed the handrail inside the open side door and swung his legs in. It was quite James Bondish!
Commuters on packed on a bus
There are people napping on the side walk curb or where ever they can get prone. Don’t know if they live there but they are there and no one steps on them.
The ladies in their bright colored, wonderfully designed saris. Immaculately clean in a generally dusty, dirty, polluted environment.
Beautiful 19th and 20th century buildings built along grand avenues that haven’t been tended to since the British left, slowly, or maybe quickly, being reduced to a pile of rubbish.
People, people everywhere, for the most part going about their daily routine of making a living. There doesn’t seem to be any really poor people, everyone is eking out a few bucks from the system, but maybe we haven’t found the slums. The mass of humanity is probably the most striking vision to a westerner.