Can We Fix It?

From a New Zealand and general Western point of view, everything about Kolkata on the surface is wrong. The natural tendency then is for us to think that it needs 'fixing' in some way.

When we were travelling to Brooklyn two days ago Zaffir, one of the Khelo Rugby boys, told us how this settlement came to be. It used to be a port settlement and was a bit of a hub. However, every year there is a Hindi festival in which every family creates an idol out of mud (about the size of a man) and at the end of the festival each family throws their idol in the river, multiply this by hundreds of thousands or even millions and you have a lot of mud entering the river. As a result the mud level has risen so significantly that many of the ships can no longer enter the river, subsequently the port is pretty much closed and thousands of jobs were lost. The buildings the Brooklyn people inhabit are abandoned port worker's houses, with no running water or electricity. 

With religion trumping a form of income in this case, it makes you think, if Kolkata was ever fixable in a Western kind of way, would the people ever let it happen or even remotely want it?

Reuben