Word: calcutta
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From Karachi to Calcutta, he flew through blinding rain and cloud. Over the Hump, which he had flown 102 times during World War II for the Chinese National Aviation Corp., the plane bounced and tossed. Blue St. Elmo's fire glowed eerily from propellers and wing tips. His automatic pilot went out. For the rest of the way, he had to fly by manual control...
Indians were erasing the memory of British rule from the very place names. Calcutta's Clive Street (India's Wall Street) had been renamed Netaji Subhas Road to honor the late Bengal leader, Subhas Chandra Bose. He was a traitor in British eyes for helping the Japs; but to Indians Bose was a patriot. The holy Ganges would revert to the Sanskrit form, Ganga. Madras would become Chennapatnam. The city of Rajahmundry would become Rajamahendravaram, which would be harder to spell, but since 87% of Indians could not write that would not matter so much...
Virtually the entire British commercial community was staying. With a capital stake estimated at four to six billion dollars, British tea planters in Assam, jute mill owners in Calcutta, heads of shipping and insurance companies in Bombay preferred the dozens of servants and the abundant food to the prospect of doing business in the deepening drabness of postwar Britain...
...India, where Baker spent three months and traveled 15,000 miles by air, dockside strikes and irregular mail delivery from TIME's branch printing plant in Cairo had accumulated quantities of unsold newsstand copies of TIME. They were stacked in a warehouse in the Moslem section of Calcutta and TLI's distributor, a Hindu like most Indian businessmen, did not dare try to recover them. Baker located a bearer who was a Christian and helped load the back copies of TIME into a truck himself. Later, the bearer, "a likeable, inoffensive little chap," was kidnapped by a band...
...salted down an incredible knowledge of Hollywood's strange ways & means. She can tell off-the-record stories that make Suetonius look like a cub from the Christian Science Monitor. She even knew what the inside of Garbo's dressing room looked like ("the black hole of Calcutta"). Studio publicity men, hard up for a story, always knew where to get it: go out and latch a siphon on to Hopper...