All cities ask you a question: Mumbai demands, “What can you do?!” Delhi connives, “What can I get from you?” Kolkata, though, muses, “What do you know?” The difference between Kolkata and Delhi seems to me a bit like that between Boston and Washington DC — the former being an intellectual city, all about what you know, the latter a political city, all about whom you know.

People believe a lot of things about Kolkata. They say that it's dirty, noisy and polluted, but they've not visited the Wetlands Eco-Park near Ruby Hospital, or walked round Rabindra Sarovar early in the morning. They say that it lives in the past and has forgone progress, but they haven't recognised how in the rest of the country education has been devalued, transformed into mere training by India's emphasis on the immediate economic value of degrees in engineering or business. In Kolkata I always catch the vibe of a culture that still values learning for the sake of knowledge, rather than learning for the sake of avarice. Sitting in the Indian Coffee House, striking up a conversation with a random table-mate, I'm likely to be asked not how much I earn, but what books I might recommend. In what other city could an annual book fair be such a mainstream occasion?

Sure, it's crowded and disorganised, and shuts down when it rains or when there's a festival or when someone decares a bandh on a whim — but this is part of the charm. If you're an intense person as I am, then you need an environment that forces you to slow down, accept where you are, accept that you aren't immediately going to reach where you desire to be, and just be where you are. That's what Kolkata does so well.