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When I tried settling down in the IIT Campus at KGP, the first thing I noticed was that everyone that picks up his ancient push bike in the evening and mounts it says he is going to Gole Bazaar, 5 kilometers away.
I asked what is meant by Gole Bazaar and they said it meant Circular Market, like I thought Connaught Place in Delhi or Piccadilly Circus in London. The only circus I knew was the one housing animals and acrobats and their feats that came with its touring tent to our Village. So, I asked a Londoner Visitor to our Faculty Hostel if there is any permanent circus show in Piccadilly, like the one in Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcCVw1jbwZo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aORTBRtvZmM
He just laughed...
When I first went to Gole Bazaar I found that there was no circle at all there...not even like our B C Roy Statue Lovers Circle. It had just one street and another perpendicular to it making a T-Junction. To this day I don't know how it got its circular name.
To go to Gole Bazaar you have to take a mandatory short cut through Chandmari Maidan (don't ask me what is Chandmari...I never investigated...once bitten...). It will save you a couple of kilometers. This Chandmari Maidan was a vast jungle then, all of it belonging to the Railways. And you have to precariously ride your push bike along the only zigzag trail blazed by a long-lost adventurer.
This Maidan then was famous for its committee of vultures that were housed atop half a dozen tall trees in the night and did their scavenging work during the mornings and evenings...the Maidan was a dumping ground for carcasses. We used to watch them at their efficient work...bone-clean by our return drive. Much later, as Development took place they just disappeared over a couple of years...attributed to harmful chemicals in their food chain...this meant an environmental disaster because the carcasses attracted hungry dogs not equipped to do the specialist job of vultures. It was a double whammy...the dogs got rabid while the carcasses, not cleaned bone dry, emitted foul smell and spread diseases. I don't know if the problem got solved by now.
As we crossed the Maidan, we used to see at a distance golf greens with their flagsticks and wondering what they were. One fine morning, our HoD, Professor HNB, summoned me to his Office and introduced me to his visitor as the current DRM of Railways, the Big Boss of the KGP Division. And asked me to help his son for his upcoming JEE exams.
Next evening onwards I was closeted with this tall and lean Punjabi teen, Vineet, in my room in the Faculty Hostel. We soon found out that neither of us was too serious about this JEE and so after a fretful hour of Resnick-Halliday we used to shut shop, go for tea and gossip. After 3 months, Vineet invited me to 'his' golf course in the Maidan offering to teach me golf as a return favor. I was too shy and declined...to this day I kick myself for not taking up the offer...not that I would have been a 'pro'...but because after a couple of years I started reading all the golf books of PGW and had to learn the game vicariously.
Vineet happily missed JEE by a few marks because he got into the Calcutta Marine Engineering and Research Institute (MERI) on the basis of his JEE Rank. He brought me a big bowl of sweets for not coaching him too hard, since as he said, he would then have been rotting as an Agricultural Engineer (JEE used to close there). Vineet, as he said, was made for the high seas...I am sure he is now a big gun in shipping circles. Just shows one must not drive one's kids too hard...just send them to me at Hyderabad...I will teach them how to blog one's life away...
There was no over-bridge then on the dozen or so adjacent railway tracks...there was just a manned wooden boom on either side. Since the tracks took a curve there the chaps manning the booms on either side couldn't see each other properly and so they had to use whistles or even throaty coos...and it was a often a pell-mell with cyclists stranded between tracks squeezed between two trains and hoping for the best.
The first shop we used to get soon after we survived the Railway Gate was the Bata Shoe Shop. Those were the glorious monopoly years of Bata with its ware manufactured in Batanagar near Calcutta. And we could shop there without emptying our pockets. Sadly, Bata, as every good thing industrial in Bengal, was soon mowed down by militant trade unionism...and was closed for a good many years. When I left KGP 40 years later, the Bata shop got a good enough place in Gole Bazaar, but was bereft of the welcoming chain of comfortable chairs with footstools...you had to walk around and purchase whatever was on display in heaps...sigh!
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