POP-A-RAZZI
Kolkata is often called the last outpost of the British Empire. Ian Jack once wrote in The Guardian that two things united Kolkata and London — “the first is expensive property and the second is the institution once known as the gentlemen’s club” with dress codes which “while they have done away with cummerbunds, still make the visitor think twice before he sets foot in one.” A friend who belongs to a prestigious gentlemen’s club in London is nowhere as much at home as in their counterparts in Kolkata. He can do Bengal Club, Calcutta Club and Tollygunge Club in one day and be dressed right for all of them. And the office bearers of these stately clubs of Kolkata, tickled pink at the attention from a bona fide Londoner, never fail to roll out the frayed red carpet to welcome him.
That this Kolkata has been so nonchalant about the Platinum Jubilee of the Queen feels like a personal snub to Her Majesty. This is a city that created Corona sandesh during the pandemic and Football sandesh during the FIFA World Cup. Kolkata even has little Big Bens and the State’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee vowed to make the city another London. Even more famously, she became the only chief minister who could say, like the nursery rhyme pussycat, that she had been to London to see the Queen. Technically she saw Prince Andrew but tea at Buckingham Palace is tea at Buckingham Palace.
