Calcutta- What Is Dying

Calcutta What Is Dying A Correspondent writes:
THE recent hullabaloo in Parliament and outside, most of all in the Calcutta Press, on whether Calcutta is dying or still kicking sharply highlights the lack of orientation or, more correctly, the extent of disorientation that marks our political articulation today. Nothing illuminates the utter hollowness of this uproar more than its origin. The impugned, and really impolitic, comment by the patently inexperienced Prime Minister that 'Calcutta is a dying city' was occasioned by the protest of a CPI(M) member of the Rajya Sabha, not against anything really vital for the life and living of the denizens of this vast metropolis, but against the withdrawal by the Scandinavian Air Services (SAS) of its weekly flight through the Calcutta airport to Copenhagen via Karachi. Could anything be more irrelevant in terms of the real problems of the nearly 10 million inhabitants of this sprawling urban complex?