We planned two days out of obligation. We stayed four out of choice. Kolkata earns more attention than it gets.
“Kolkata is just old buildings and traffic” is the myth we walked in believing, and the city corrected us within a day.
The myth reduces it to crumbling colonial architecture and chaos — a city to pass through, never to stay in. What we actually found was coffee house culture that’s still genuinely, loudly alive: hours of conversation, cold coffee, arguments about nothing that matter enormously in the moment. A food scene that goes far past the two or three dishes people always name. Art, literature, and theatre running through the city’s veins with almost none of the credit that’s due.
The myth persists mostly because most visitors only see Kolkata as a layover between the Northeast and the rest of India — never as a destination anyone actually chose.
We planned two days out of obligation. We stayed four out of choice. Kolkata deserves more attention than it gets, and it doesn’t ask twice.
— Suparna
P.S. — this one’s also up as a reel in Hindi, if that’s more your speed.