Seems to me. that it has been rather a long time since I wrote on of these - haven't had much to say really and didn't want to bore you all with all the depression stuff. Still a bit short of things to say but here goes.

When I was a small baba the world, it seemed, revolved around me. With that glorious innocence and selfishness that only the very young possess I was convinced that I lived in a universe that existed only to serve me and make me happy.

My mother saw that and wanting a well rounded child, not a possible sociopath, tried very hard to show me that there was wide world out there and many, many others also existed in it and had no idea of my small little place in the scheme of things. She took me to Shsihu Bhawan to show me Mother Theresa's orphans - children thrown onto rubbish heaps barely alive in their first wavering cries among the dung and detritus of a bustling city.

She took me to work with Father Andrew with sone the of drug addicts at his house out at Dum Dum. She opened my eyes to another world and for all the blunting of emotions that living in Calcutta can give you over time she taught me to see beyond the world of Chowrighee and Park St.

Calcutta was a very poor city - a place where people lived cheek by jowl with gut wrenching poverty and disease and it was there for all to see - played on the stage of the city streets. We all learned to live with it - to become blind to the pot bellied malnourished children, the stick thin rikshaw wallahs coughing their tubercular coughs as they pulled us from the New Market to Park St,

It struck me as I started to write this that some of you have thought that my love affair with my city is somehow myopic .... but no, I saw, I felt the pain and I still do.