Danny in Calcutta (Part I).
CALCUTTA
("City of Dreadful Night " - Kipling).
For servicemen stationed in Calcutta and all points East, Calcutta (now "Kolkata") was the destination of choice for leave, just as Cairo was in N. Africa. Indeed it was the only choice, even if you were going further afield, you usually had to go through "Cal" in the first place. I must say the new name makes no sense to me. I believe the name derives from "Kali", the Hindu goddess of death, and "Ghat" a landing place on a river, specifically where cremations take place. It is quite easy to see how that might sound like "Calcutta" to the first Europeans who asked. There is a story that an early explorer in Australia, seeing a large hopping animal, asked an Aboringine (by signs) its name. "I don't know", came the reply - "Kangaroo" !
Why change "Calcutta" to "Kolkata"? They sound very much the same as "Bombay" and "Mumbai", and "Peking" and "Beijing". And how have Delhi and Bangalore avoided a change (so far) ? And why has Madras changed to "Chennai" - which sounds nothing like it ? It's a mystery to me.
You arrived in "Cal" by air at Dum-Dum, or by train at Howrah station. Dum-Dum was out to the East of the city. There was a very large munitions factory there; the place has given its name to the flat-nosed bullets which were first manufactured there, and which have a much increased stopping power.
On arrival, if you were not entitled to, or could not scrounge a lift, on some service transport, you climbed aboard a taxi, always an old open American tourer: "Grand Hotel", you said, "Chowringhee" - to let the (invariably) Sikh driver know that you were familiar with the city and couldn't be taken on an expensive ride round town.
During the war, the Grand was the leave base for all aircrew. It is still there, now the Oberoi Grand, with five stars and prices to match. Then they let in service officers and NCO aircrew, but no other BORs. You shared, two to a room (no choice of your room mate). Full board was ten rupees a day (about £ 30 in today's money); this you could easily afford - about a day's pay for a sergeant-pilot, much less for an officer.
We gorged ourselves, I remember there were about ten courses on the menu at lunch and dinner, and nobody batted an eyelid if you worked your way through from top to bottom. This you could easily do if you'd been living in the field on service rations for a few months.
One of my chance room mates told an interesting story. He was a young American who'd joined the Air Corps as an Aviation Cadet at much the same time as I. "Washed out" half way through Primary School for some flying misdemeanour, he'd left the Air Corps (which he was perfectly entitled to do), and applied to the Chinese National Airways Corporation ( a distant ancestor of Cathay Pacific).
They used American crews, and had taken him on as a second pilot on their DC-3s with which they flew a regular service "over the Hump" into China from Calcutta to Kunming. Their business (very lucrative, I believe) was to ferry urgent supplies to the Nationalist leader, Chiang-kai-shek, who was fighting the Japanese invaders (without much success).
All my chap had to do was to keep the thing straight and level on course and look out for mountain tops. He was really no more than a human autopilot, even with thirty hours flying time he could do that. His captain would navigate and do all the take-offs and landings. For this simple task they were paying him Rs750 a month, three times what the RAF was paying me for bombing the Japs and being shot at into the bargain - and he'd failed that same Course I'd passed ! Not for the first - or last - time, I realised there's no justice in this world!
But I must admit that his pay was really danger money. It was a thousand mile haul, and the DC-3s had to get right up to their ceiling to get over the "Hump" (the Ta Liang Shan range - 18,000 ft.) There were losses; it was rumoured that some of these were the result of "off-manifest" (smuggled) cargoes, which earned the crews many times their pay, but overloaded the aircraft so that they just didn't manage to scrape over the tops in cloud.
Early on, I was given a useful insight into practical ethics. The '42 Bengal famine was at its height, basically because we'd lost Burma and all its rice exports, aggravated by the business acumen of the Bengali rice merchants, who were sitting on their stocks, waiting for higher prices. In consequence, when you strolled down Calcutta streets in the mornings, you skirted delicately round the previous night's starvation corpses awaiting collection by the trucks of the Calcutta Municipality (this was long before Mother Teresa's time).
My interlocutor was an Old India Hand. I was a tender-hearted youth in those days. "Why can't we do something for these poor devils ?" "Listen", said the OlH, "you have a hundred starving Indians". "You have a whip-round and collect enough cash to feed them for a twelvemonth". "Then you go back - do you find a hundred well-fed Indians ?" "You do not". "What do you find ?" "You find a hundred and fifty starving Indians".
This is a gross exaggeration, but it embodies a grim truth. Any zoologist will tell you that every animal population will (disease and predation apart) increase until it is limited by its food supply, and it is obvious that it must be so. What is not obvious is that this applies equally to human populations. It is not pretty to see this happening on our TV screens, and it evokes the generous outbursts of charitable effort with which we are all familiar. I do not say that these are pointless, but even if all the monies donated could immediately be turned into food on the spot (and this is often very far from the case) the same remorseless logic would apply in the end.
More about "Cal" next time,
All the best,
Danny42C.
You never can tell.
Last edited by Danny42C; 19th Aug 2012 at 00:27.
Reason: Correct Error