Kolkata was a very nice city, very cosmopolitan and bustling. Nice metro, nice trams.

There's something strange going on in Calcutta, however. I stayed on Sudder Street, where most backpacker stay and because there are so many westerners there, that's where, as you might expect, tehre are lots of beggars and touts. I've travelled a lot in Asia and I've seen a fair amount of poverty but never before in my life have I seen westerners actually hanging out with the destitute street people. On sudder street, it is absolutely routine to see some fair haired european woman sitting in the street, surrounded by beggars, holding a child in her lap and having her hair combed by a different street person. I saw young couples, westerners, walking young street kids down the street, hand in hand. Now, there's nothing wrong with this, obviously, but it just struck me as very odd. I asked around and a Bengali told me people come to Calcutta and stay at some home founded by the Catholic woman who got famous in calcutta and as part of their duty they hang with the street people. My question is: Why Calcutta? Why not Vientiane? Why not Ahmedabad? I've never seen this behaviour anywhere else in my life. Is it a Catholic complex? And I speak, of course, as someone born into the Church. It was very very strange and not a little unsettling.