Not that I’m complaining, but nothing really happens in Salt Lake. When I was in college, friends would refuse to make the trek up from south Kolkata, citing remoteness (unfair: I’m less than ten kilometres from the heart of Kolkata) and the desolation of suburbia (ahem). ‘Impossible to get home after 8!’ they’d protest, in a city famed for its public transit. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Salt Lake had no large shopping centres, two restaurants, one bar (attached to one of the restaurants), one hospital and no cinemas. Even today, we experience next to nothing of the three essential components of the Great Indian City: traffic jams, electoral violence and waterlogging.

Although it is called Bidhannagar in official documents and on government buildings—after its founder Dr Bidhan Roy, educationist, statesman, second chief minister of West Bengal and sometime physician to Mohandas Gandhi—no self-respecting Calcuttan will ever call it that. The area was an assemblage of saltwater lakes before it was turned into a satellite town for a Kolkata bursting at the seams; its vulgar name and the coconut trees that grow all over are the only residue of Salt Lake’s bygone salinity.

• Tags: India, Issue 25, Sudipto Sanyal