Kolkata, New York

In the New Statesman, Amit Chaudhuri writes of the gentrification of New York and, in passing, compares it to his current home, Kolkata: "It wasn't just the decay, casually exhibited, the distracted streams of passers-by, the anarchy at traffic lights; it was the way both cities bore the marks of being born of, and mutilated by, modernity. The allure and aesthetic of the ugly: the modern mind's recuperation, in both Europe and India, of Hinduism's odd dialectic with the unattractive and the terrifying, in which these are seen as attributes of divinity rather than the satanic." Hmm. A rather long-winded way of asserting that, in 1979, both cities were in dire need of a makeover.