My First Journey to Kolkata: Temples, Streets, Food, Culture & Personal Experiences

 

Kolkata — The Journey That Quietly Changed Something in Me

Some journeys give us photographs. 
Some give us memories. And a rare few return us home as slightly different people.

Kolkata was that kind of journey for me.

It was my first journey beyond Bangladesh, yet strangely, I never felt that I had travelled very far from home. I had crossed an international border, yes—but Bengali was still being spoken around me. Tea was still an excuse for conversation. Rice, fish, sweets, arguments, politics, faith and humour still occupied their familiar places in everyday life.

And yet, almost immediately, I could feel the differences.

That fascinated me.

Perhaps that is what made Kolkata so memorable. It was neither completely foreign nor completely familiar. It felt like meeting a distant relative for the first time—someone whose face reminds you of your own family, but whose life has followed an entirely different road.

I arrived as a traveller.

Somewhere along the way, I became an observer.

And by the time I returned home, I had started observing myself as well.

The First Thing I Noticed — A Different Rhythm of Life

One of my earliest impressions was the way people seemed to think about money.

Coming from Bangladesh, I was accustomed to a certain spontaneity around spending and hospitality. In Kolkata, I often encountered people who appeared remarkably careful about even small expenses.

At first, I confess, my Bangladeshi mind interpreted it rather quickly:

“These people are incredibly stingy!”

But travel has a funny habit of embarrassing our first conclusions.

The more I watched, the more I wondered whether what I was seeing was actually something else—frugality, discipline, perhaps simply a different relationship with money.

People calculated.

They negotiated.

They knew what something should cost.

And they did not always seem embarrassed about arguing over a relatively small amount.

Eventually, instead of judging it, I became curious about it.

That was one of Kolkata's first lessons for me:

a culture does not become wrong simply because it behaves differently from the culture that raised us.

Victoria Memorial — When History Suddenly Became Physical

Then came Victoria Memorial.

I had seen photographs before. Of course I had.

But photographs flatten things.

Standing before that enormous white monument was different.

For a moment, I simply looked.

The marble, the dome, the gardens, the symmetry—everything seemed designed to announce permanence. Yet what fascinated me most was not merely its beauty.

It was the history behind the beauty.

Standing there as someone from Bangladesh, I could not look at British imperial architecture as merely architecture. The history represented inside those walls is connected, however complicatedly, with the history of Bengal, India, Bangladesh and generations of people who lived through an extraordinary period of political change.

Tourists were taking photographs.

Families were walking through the gardens.

Couples were finding quiet corners.

Children were running around.

And history stood silently behind all of us.

I remember thinking how strange that was.

Empires disappear.

People keep taking family photographs.

The Maidan — A Little Space to Breathe

Around the Victoria Memorial and the Maidan, Kolkata suddenly seemed to loosen its collar.

After traffic, crowds and buildings, there was space.

Green.

Sky.

People sitting without apparently needing to go anywhere.

That may sound like a small detail, but travelling teaches you to appreciate transitions. One moment I was surrounded by noise; a little later, the city seemed capable of breathing.

Nearby, St. Paul's Cathedral added another layer to that landscape.

By then I was beginning to understand that Kolkata could change its historical personality within a few streets.

The Metro — Cheap, Fast and Surprisingly Liberating

The Kolkata Metro became one of my favourite practical discoveries.

There is something deeply satisfying about figuring out public transport in a city you do not know.

At first, there is hesitation:

Which platform?

Which direction?

Where do I get off?

Then suddenly you understand the map, and the city becomes yours—at least a little.

I travelled from one part of Kolkata to another without spending much money, and that mattered to me. Travel does not have to be luxurious to feel rich.

Sometimes the greatest luxury is simply knowing that you can keep moving.

Inside the Metro I watched office workers, students, families and elderly passengers. Everyone seemed to know exactly what they were doing.

I was the one quietly checking everything twice.

Nobody knew.

At least, I hope nobody knew.

The Tram — A City Refusing to Forget Its Past

And then there was the tram.

Seeing a tram moving through Kolkata traffic felt almost cinematic.

Cars wanted speed.

Buses wanted space.

People wanted to cross.

And somewhere among all of them, the tram seemed completely uninterested in anyone's urgency.

I loved that.

There was something wonderfully stubborn about it.

A modern city usually tries to erase anything that looks slow or old. Kolkata somehow allowed some of its old machinery to become part of its personality.

B.B.D. Bagh — Walking Through Power and History

B.B.D. Bagh gave me another Kolkata entirely.

The architecture felt formal. Government buildings, offices, people moving with purpose—the atmosphere was different from the markets and religious places.

Here, history did not feel decorative.

It felt administrative.

I remember moving through this part of the city and later making my way toward Salt Lake by public transport.

That journey itself became interesting.

Old Kolkata slowly began giving way to wider roads and a more planned urban landscape.

Same city.

Different century.

Salt Lake — When Kolkata Changed Clothes

Salt Lake surprised me.

By then I had begun associating Kolkata with old façades, crowded streets, markets, temples and colonial buildings.

Then Salt Lake appeared.

Wider roads. Planned neighbourhoods. Offices. A different pace.

It felt almost as though Kolkata had changed clothes while I was not looking.

That contrast became one of the things I enjoyed most about the city.

Kolkata never allowed me to settle on a single definition of Kolkata.

Dakshineswar — Faith Beside the River

Dakshineswar was different from everything that came before it.

The moment I entered the temple environment, the rhythm changed.

People were carrying offerings. Bells rang. Devotees moved forward with expressions that were sometimes joyful, sometimes serious, sometimes impossible for an outsider to read.

And then there was the Hooghly.

Water has a strange effect on religious places.

Perhaps it is because rivers already carry their own symbolism—movement, purification, continuity, time.

I stood there watching people pray.

For a while I stopped thinking about what I should photograph.

I simply watched.

There are moments in travel when the camera becomes almost intrusive.

This was one of them.

Belur Math — The Beauty of Not Rushing

Belur Math gave me something Kolkata had not given me very often:

stillness.

I remember the openness, the river, the architecture and the sense that people had come there not merely to see something, but to become quiet.

So I became quiet too.

For once there was no urgent destination.

No bargaining.

No station to find.

No question about which bus I should take.

Just a little time beside the river.

I have come to believe that travel should contain moments like this.

Otherwise, we return home having seen everything and understood nothing.

Kalighat — Devotion in Motion

Kalighat was almost the opposite experience.

If Belur Math whispered, Kalighat spoke loudly.

Crowds.

Movement.

Narrow approaches.

Shops.

Offerings.

Voices.

Devotion everywhere.

It reminded me that spirituality does not have one atmosphere.

Faith can exist in silence.

It can also exist in chaos.

And somehow both can be sincere.

Temples, Bells and the Sacred Geography of Kolkata

My temple journeys did not end there.

As I moved through Kolkata, religious architecture repeatedly became part of the landscape.

Birla Mandir presented a more polished, spacious visual experience. Other smaller temples appeared almost unexpectedly between ordinary streets and neighbourhood life.

That fascinated me.

In Kolkata, faith did not always seem separated from daily life.

Sometimes it was simply there—

beside a shop,

at the end of a lane,

behind traffic,

between two ordinary buildings.

I began noticing bells before buildings.

Alipore Zoo — And Then I Met the Tiger

The Alipore Zoo gave me a completely different kind of memory.

The tiger.

I had seen tigers in photographs and videos countless times.

That is not the same thing.

Even with a barrier between us, there was something about the animal's movement that demanded attention.

People around me were excited.

Phones appeared immediately.

Children waited for something dramatic to happen.

The tiger, meanwhile, seemed spectacularly unimpressed by all of us.

I watched for quite a while.

Perhaps too long.

But when an animal can make an entire crowd wait simply by walking from one side of an enclosure to another, I think it has earned the attention.

Birla Planetarium — Suddenly, Kolkata Became Very Small

After history, traffic, markets, temples and animals, the planetarium changed the scale of my thoughts.

Suddenly we were talking about planets.

Stars.

Space.

The universe.

And for a little while, Kolkata itself seemed tiny.

So did Bangladesh.

So did borders.

There is something healthy about occasionally being reminded how small we are.

New Market — Where Bargaining Becomes Theatre

Then came New Market.

Ah, New Market.

If you enjoy shopping, you can lose time there very easily.

If you enjoy bargaining, you can lose your voice.

Perfumes, clothes, bags, shoes, accessories—every direction seemed to contain another invitation to spend money.

And the prices?

Well.

That depended partly on the product...

and partly, I suspected, on how innocent you looked.

I quickly learned an important rule:

A cheap price is not automatically a good deal.

There are genuine bargains, certainly. There are also products whose quality deserves a little more investigation than their enthusiastic seller may initially suggest.

So I learned to look carefully.

Ask.

Compare.

Walk away.

Sometimes walking away produces a miraculous change in price.

New Market taught me economics in a way no textbook ever had.

Sreeleathers — A Wallet and a Memory

One of my purchases was wonderfully ordinary.

A wallet.

I bought it from Sreeleathers for around four hundred rupees.

Nothing dramatic happened.

No grand revelation.

No cinematic music.

I simply bought a wallet.

Yet that wallet became one of those small objects that carries a location inside it.

Back home, whenever I used it, Kolkata came back for a second.

That is one of the beautiful things about travel souvenirs.

Their monetary value is often completely irrelevant.

Memory determines the real price.

College Street — Where Books Seem to Grow From the Pavement

College Street appealed to another part of me.

Books.

So many books.

There is something deeply reassuring about a street where knowledge appears to have escaped from buildings and spread onto pavements.

Old books.

Academic books.

Literature.

Textbooks.

Editions whose previous owners I would never know.

I found myself wondering how many hands some of those books had passed through.

Nearby, the intellectual mythology surrounding Coffee House seemed perfectly appropriate.

A city famous for arguments needed somewhere to sit down and continue them.

The Indian Museum — Objects That Outlive Their Owners

Museums always make me slightly uncomfortable in a useful way.

The Indian Museum was no exception.

You walk past objects that have survived the people who made them.

Sometimes by centuries.

Suddenly our obsession with urgency looks rather silly.

We spend our days rushing.

History waits patiently in a glass case.

Jorasanko — Where Bengali Identity Felt Larger Than a Border

Jorasanko carried another kind of emotion for me.

Rabindranath Tagore belongs to a cultural world that cannot be neatly contained by the modern political border between India and Bangladesh.

Standing within that wider Bengali cultural geography felt personal.

I was abroad.

And yet I was not entirely outside my own cultural inheritance.

That contradiction moved me.

Borders are real.

So is memory.

Kumartuli — Watching Hands Create Gods

Kumartuli fascinated me because it allowed me to see creation before completion.

Clay.

Straw.

Unfinished faces.

Hands working.

Colours waiting.

The finished idol is beautiful, certainly.

But seeing the process gives beauty another dimension.

You realize how much human labour exists behind what eventually appears sacred and effortless.

The Lanes of North Kolkata — Where the City Became Personal

Some of my strongest impressions did not come from famous monuments.

They came from lanes.

Old balconies.

Tea stalls.

Electrical wires hanging in impossible arrangements.

A bicycle passing where I was convinced no bicycle could possibly fit.

Someone calling from a window.

Someone arguing with a shopkeeper.

Someone drinking tea as if the entire afternoon had been created specifically for that purpose.

This was not postcard Kolkata.

It was better.

It was lived-in Kolkata.

Howrah Bridge — Entering a Photograph

Howrah Bridge had existed in my imagination long before I stood near it.

That creates a strange experience.

You already know the image.

Then suddenly the image has sound.

Traffic.

Footsteps.

Voices.

Wind.

A river below.

It is no longer a photograph.

You are inside it.

I remember looking at the Hooghly and thinking:

“So this is it.”

Sometimes four words are enough.

Prinsep Ghat — When the City Finally Slowed Down

Prinsep Ghat gave me another relationship with the river.

The atmosphere felt softer.

People walked.

People sat.

Boats moved across the water.

The city remained nearby, but its noise seemed less important.

I liked being there toward the quieter part of the day.

After spending hours trying to reach destinations, it felt good to be somewhere without needing to reach anything else.

Park Street — Kolkata After Sunset

Evening changed Kolkata again.

Park Street had a different energy—restaurants, cafés, lights, people meeting, eating, talking.

The religious city had disappeared.

The colonial city had changed.

Now Kolkata looked cosmopolitan.

I began to suspect the city enjoyed confusing me.

Every time I thought I understood it, another neighbourhood disagreed.

Food — The City Through Taste

No memory of Kolkata would be complete without food.

Food here was not simply something I ate between destinations.

It became part of the travelling.

Tea.

Phuchka.

Kathi rolls.

Luchi.

Alur dom.

Fish.

Biryani.

Kosha mangsho.

Mishti doi.

Sandesh.

Rosogolla.

Sometimes the famous foods lived up to their reputation.

Sometimes the simplest thing tasted best because I was exhausted and hungry.

Travel does that.

Hunger is an excellent restaurant critic.

People, Clothing and My Own Cultural Surprise

There were also moments when everyday social behaviour surprised me.

Some styles of clothing, personal presentation and interaction between men and women felt noticeably different from what I was accustomed to seeing around me in Bangladesh.

Initially, I noticed those differences very strongly.

Then something changed.

I began noticing my own reaction.

Why did something seem unusual to me?

Was it actually unusual—or merely unfamiliar?

That distinction matters.

Travel should make us observant, certainly.

But observation without humility can easily become judgment.

I did not want to return home merely having collected opinions about another society.

I wanted to understand why I had those opinions in the first place.

What Kolkata Changed in Me

Looking back, I could make a list.

Victoria Memorial.

The Maidan.

St. Paul's.

The Metro.

The tram.

B.B.D. Bagh.

Salt Lake.

Dakshineswar.

Belur Math.

Kalighat.

Birla Mandir.

Alipore Zoo.

Birla Planetarium.

New Market.

Sreeleathers.

College Street.

Indian Museum.

Jorasanko.

Kumartuli.

Howrah Bridge.

Prinsep Ghat.

Park Street.

And countless streets whose names I no longer remember.

But a list would miss the point.

Kolkata was important to me not because of how many places I visited.

It was important because of how often the city made me think.

I thought about money.

Culture.

History.

Religion.

Infrastructure.

Food.

Clothing.

Identity.

Borders.

Behaviour.

And, unexpectedly, myself.

Before this journey, travelling meant going somewhere.

After Kolkata, it meant something slightly different.

It meant allowing a place to question me.

Perhaps that is why my clearest memory is not a monument.

It is a feeling.

The feeling of sitting on a bus without knowing the city perfectly.

The feeling of stepping onto a Metro platform and realizing I was beginning to understand the route.

The feeling of standing beside the Hooghly.

The feeling of hearing temple bells.

The feeling of negotiating over something in New Market and wondering whether I had won—or whether the shopkeeper had simply allowed me to believe I had.

The feeling of looking at Kolkata and recognizing Bengal...

but not quite recognizing home.

And that difference was beautiful.

The Journey Home

When the journey ended, I carried photographs.

I carried purchases.

I carried stories.

But the most valuable thing was something I could not put inside my luggage.

Perspective.

Kolkata taught me that familiarity and difference can exist together.

That history can survive inside an ordinary afternoon.

That faith can whisper and shout.

That a city can be old without being finished.

And that travelling to another place sometimes gives us enough distance to see our own lives more clearly.

Kolkata was my first journey of that kind.

It certainly would not be my last.

And perhaps that is where this blog truly begins.

Not with a destination.

With curiosity.

Because the journeys worth remembering are not only the ones that show us another part of the world.

They are the ones that quietly reveal another part of ourselves.