City Tales
Hello, dear readers. Hope 2024 has kicked off on a good note for you. I rang in the New Year at my birthplace, Kolkata, India, surrounded by family, old friends, and a thick layer of grimy smog that increasingly smothers the sprawling metropolis every winter.
I was visiting after a gap of four years, during which Kolkata seems to have gotten ever more chaotic. Its towering new skyscrapers jostle for space with stately old homes reconfigured into posh cafes and boutiques, which in turn are inevitably hemmed in by ramshackle roadside shops and eateries. Its streets are jam-packed with vehicles of all sizes and shapes as well as pedestrians who skillfully dart through the traffic maze. Life, it feels, is bursting at the seams here. Some of that seeming is probably in the eye of this beholder — after more than a decade living in the quiet hills of Berkeley, California, the city has become unaccustomed grounds for me. But Kolkata is indeed growing. When I left it in 2009, the population of the city’s metro area was 13.9 million. Today, it is 15.5 million. Moving around the city with my mask on in a feeble attempt to guard against soaring AQIs, I was reminded of what I’d written in this article in our special issue on urban environments: “While humanity is trending towards an urban future, the current fossil-fueled model of the city itself is trending towards collapse.” (The issue, incidentally, won the first place for environmental reporting at the San Francisco Press Club Awards in December. Yay!) Kolkata is certainly one of those urban centers hanging in precarious balance between growth and collapse. In many ways, it is a perfect example of the immense challenge to sustainability that cities represent, a challenge we have to tackle sooner than later given some 68 percent of humanity will be living in cities by 2050. But there is more to Kolkata than that. As with all cities around the world, it is also a place where diversity, culture, art, and ideas have long thrived. Personally, its people and places have helped shape who I am today, and it continues to offer me the comfort of family and the warmth of friends whenever I return. What is a place that sustains you similarly? Do share.
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