He likes the ‘stink’ in Calcutta and adores the chaos that marks the city. It acts both as a stimulant and, he grudgingly conceded, an irritant as well. But the city’s familiar chaos feeds his creativity and he, declared film-maker Mrinal Sen, given a choice, would not settle anywhere else.

Speaking at a panel discussion on ‘Fly Over Calcutta: Visions for the Megapolis’, Sen pointed out that his longest sojourn abroad has been in Belgium for three months and it had ‘felt’ like an age. The oldest panelist of the evening, Sen passionately defended the city where, he defiantly declared, he felt completely at home.

Significantly, the youngest panelist, Mansoor Nazeer, felt no such thing. It was a pain, he said, living here. The man from Max Mueller Bhavan did not mince his words. Living in Calcutta remains for him an “unceasing trauma”, a nightmare, a battlefield. Much of his energy, he suggested, is sapped by the mere effort he has to make to reach the workplace and return. At the end of it all, he is too exhausted for any creative pursuit.

Calcutta likes nothing better than a discussion, wryly commented moderator Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, and the city loves it even more if the discussion is on itself. Not too long ago, however, he reminded the audience, there were actually two very different ‘Calcuttas’ in the city.

There was the European or English Calcutta, which was grand and glorious, and there was the native Calcutta, which wallowed in squalor. Natives did not have the right to use Red Road and the benches in Eden Gardens were actually marked ‘For Europeans only’. SSKM Hospital was out of bounds for ‘natives’, who were expected to flock to Sambhunath Pandit Hospital. Therefore, Datta-Ray commented, much of what the city prided itself on was not created by “us”.

That could well have set the tone for the discussion, hosted jointly by The Telegraph, Max Mueller Bhavan and Goethe Institut. But the panelists appeared intent to reinforce Datta-Ray’s observation that “we live in the past”. None of the panelists, arguably, has ever had to pee against a flyover. But peeing in public by hoi-polloi dominated much of the discussion.

Journalist Aveek Sen’s sensibilities took a beating while taking a late-night walk. Every kind of “bedroom activity” could be seen on the pavements, he exclaimed with wonder in his voice, and felt that the city has stripped both dignity and privacy of the people and blurred the distinction between the ‘private and the public’.

This was a point that Mansoor had taken up earlier. The perspective was different, though. The Calcuttan, he felt, fiercely protected his private space but was indifferent to what is ‘public’. That is why the Calcuttan does not protest much when as many as 400 trees are felled, almost overnight, to widen the road or when the pavements are shortened so much that it would be impossible to walk on them.

Ashis Chakrabarti, journalist, felt it was a clever, if diabolical, ploy by the crafty mayor to drive out the pavement vendors. Prevented from driving out the vendors by Mamata Banerjee, the mayor, Chakraborty felt, had discovered a different method of achieving the same goal.

Much of the problems of the city, he said, can be traced to the mindset of both the rulers and the ruled. For an abnormally long period, Chakraborty pointed out, wallowing in poverty has been glorified here. Creation of wealth was looked upon as a venal, somewhat suspicious, activity and material development, it was believed, benefited only the rich.

The panelist felt Calcutta required to follow the example set by Pittsburgh, in the United States. With the decline of the steel industry, the once-bustling city of Pittsburgh fell on bad days and it was not the fault of either the city or its people. But the people decided to revive the city and took what’s known as the ‘Pittsburgh Pledge’. A different but definite action plan was required to ensure growth and employment in the city, he suggested, and development would follow.

It was left to historian Barun De to wryly point out that people in the city can now ‘live in the sky’, invited to do so in one of the highrise apartments dotting the skyline. Sky-dwellers would, naturally, have no problem with the city, which has, however, become unliveable for those ‘who walk’, he said.

De took a potshot at the state government, which constituted a heritage commission three years ago but provided it with neither funds nor an office.

Bonani Kakkar from PUBLIC, however, felt that improvements were discernible in many parts of the city, though she, too, was shocked at the callous felling of trees.

A panel discussion, by definition, is where a group of people meet and decide either that nothing can be done or ‘a lot remains to be done’, or a group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

On this evening, though, it seemed to be a case of a group of people who individually can do a lot but, as a group, can merely pass the buck.