Word: calcutta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hong Kong -Calcutta -Karachi BOAC route was inevitably a temptation to smugglers. Hong Kong, for example, makes no check of outgoing baggage. And India, with its stable rupee and a middle class that likes to convert its savings into solid-gold jewelry for safekeeping (and dowries), has been the world's best market for contraband gold for centuries...
BOAC's crews in Asia, carrying only overnight cases, enjoying the semiofficial aura of their familiar dark blue uniforms, making frequent comings and goings, usually got casual treatment from customs officials. But last May Indian customs at Calcutta's Dum Dum airport found a 7-oz. gold bar in Chinese Stewardess Jenny Wang's handbag. (Her explanation: Hong Kong residents "customarily" carry gold as "mad money" in case the Chinese Communists should suddenly overrun the city.) A fellow steward, David Furlonger, seeing her being searched, was overheard by an Indian customs official as he remarked...
...Calcutta University, the world's largest (enrollment: 90,000), is so completely a factory that it runs classes in three shifts a day. Its urban colleges are ill-lighted and have no recreational facilities. The only gathering places are coffee shops and tea shops, where Marx-hipped hotheads often dominate the conversation. Classes are so perfunctory and lectures so mechanical that many students leave after roll call; a friend can always supply notes and, more important, provide names and pages of books the professor referred...
Babies & Walking Dead. Last week, when the day of the Jagannath Festival dawned, the city of Puri (pop. 60,000) was packed with 150,000 pilgrims from all over India. Some had come crammed into special trains from Calcutta, 265 miles to the north; wide-eyed peasants had come on foot, herded by professional guides. There were women with babies, young students of Yoga, families of dark, half-naked tribesmen from the jungles. Medical officers manned every road, armed with hypodermic needles to head off the cholera which used to sweep through Puri after the festival. Holy men, their naked...
...chaotic country to rights. Tawny-skinned and brown-eyed, with a thin face and frame like that of Frank Sinatra, Prime Minister Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala was born at Banaras, India in 1914, where his articulate professional father had fled the wrath of the Ranas. Graduating from the University of Calcutta with a law degree, Koirala joined Nehru and Gandhi in the fight for Indian independence, was jailed for 2^ years by the British. With the downfall of the Ranas, he returned to Nepal with his older half brother, M. P. Koirala, over whom he later triumphed in a struggle...