Dear Calcutta

Dear Calcutta,

Its strange falling in love with an old friend! Especially if it comes after 25 years of a bitter-sweet, love-to-hate-you relationship.

I'm sure I'm not your first admirer and now I am quite convinced that I wont be the last either. Even so, if you please, this is my very first and very public declaration of 'true love'. I'm a little sorry that I'm doing this in English; but perhaps that is most fitting, for it is you, who made me the anglophile I am.

This love came to me, one rainy evening in the Bombay monsoons. When I realized that even rains were more beautiful with you! That, of course, opened the floodgates.

The food you have is quite simply the best.

The people unparalleled in their judgmental nature, their loud lives, their interfering noses and their quintessential Bengaliness.

The history you carry overwhelms me and I'm in mesmerized by how little I know you.

But what I love best about you is that its only here in Calcutta that I can have a chocolate pastry for under 10 bucks.

I love that you have rains and mild winters and I love how you get my goat with those sweaty sultry summer afternoons.

But I ask myself, is this love? Well, I guess it is.

Because you let me be what I love being most, lazy and loud. Nobody in Calcutta has ever asked me to tone it down. No one has ever asked me how I can spend all the livelong day talking to a friend! I love the person you made me and even at the cost of sounding serious, "amar ami ke ami ei kolkatatei khnuje pai"!

So today, for the sake of year ends and new beginnings, I pledge to you Calcutta (and never ever Kolkata) my undying love and my everlasting fidelity.

You will always be home.