Word: calcuttas
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...Calcutta's filthy, fly-infested streets it is often hard to tell the living from the dead. Thousands of the area's 4,500,000 people, hungry and unemployed, huddle day and night in dank back alleys or sprawl on the sidewalks splotched red with betel spittle. The dead sometimes lie where they are for days before police vans cart them off to the burning ghats. The dying, picked up and carried from hospital to crowded hospital, used to be dumped back on the streets; there was simply no room for a hopeless case...
Last week a slim, grey-eyed woman in a blue-bordered sari was briskly going about the business of making Calcutta a better place to die in-and to ward off death when possible. Mother Teresa and 62 sisters of the six-year-old Roman Catholic Order of the Missionaries of Charity are running one of Asia's most remarkable missions at the very gate of the temple of Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction...
...Lama, 19, Red-ruled gods-on-earth to some 3,000,000 Tibetans, neared the close of their six-week tour of India honoring the 2,500th anniversary of the death of Buddha-and celebrated in a great big way. Picking up $105,000 petty cash one morning at Calcutta's Communist-capitalist Bank of China, the Dalai Lama continued his madcap spending spree. No haggler, the Lama snapped up a $1,300 diamond-studded watch; when told it was a bit costly, he emitted a hearty, innocent laugh. He also amassed some German cameras, Swiss watches, radios...
Link No. 2 came after typhoid from polluted water killed several foreign guests in Calcutta's renowned Grand Hotel and forced it to close. As the onetime haunt of Britain's royalty and India's maharajas became known derisively as the "blackest hole of Calcutta," Oberoi saw an opportunity. He talked the hotel's liquidators into a low-cost five-year lease, although his total resources were $67 in the bank and his mortgaged Simla hotel. He tore out the Grand's rat-infested plumbing, offered typhoid-worried guests unlimited soda water even for washing...
Profit & Plumbing. In 1943 poor management in the Associated Hotels chain gave Oberoi his chance. As Associated stock sagged from $2 to 20? on the Calcutta exchange, Oberoi and some partners bought up 54% of the stock, and with it, Associated's eight hotels. Others soon followed as Oberoi improved his hotels. He put modern toilet facilities in every room, central heating and air conditioning into the Grand Hotel in Calcutta and the Imperial in New Delhi, Swiss, German and French managers-bone-bred hoteliers-into most of his hotels. By Indian standards his hotels are excellent...