What sort of an eye would find Calcutta beautiful? Some would argue that such a gaze would have to be blinded with love. Or else, foreign enough to find in bad taste and dreariness exotic forms of the postcolonial. There is a certain slant of light in which a garbage heap, a roadside urinal, clouds of exhaust, a shopping mall, NRI apartments, or even a flyover might become radiant with beauty. So instead of relying on such tricks of weather, the guardians of the city have resolved to fight the burgeoning ugliness more concretely. Designated ?heritage zones? are going to be made free of hoardings, and the sky above them cleared of advertising balloons. Cobbled pavements and Victorian railing will enhance the grandeur of the city?s colonial heart. And the Calcutta Corporation is willing to let go of huge amounts of revenue for the sake of beauty.

This is laudable. All civilized cities disallow intrusive advertising. The displays on Times Square, Piccadilly or Potsdamer Platz are blended with the area?s futurist or postmodern feel. But a wider view of Calcutta?s urban aesthetic, especially the look of its ?developing? face, would make a disheartening survey. At the core of Bengali public culture lies a form of irredeemable bad taste. This is as evident in the heaped-up gaudiness of the Marble Palace as in the ridiculous statues of regional heroes that have replaced the city?s imperial pantheon. The aesthetics of both governmental and privatized urban planning are no aesthetics at all. No amount of pulling down of hoardings in the Chowringhee area would undo the damage done by that ugliest and most immovable of hoardings ? the flyover. And everywhere ? from the ostentatious parks to the Muscovite grimness of some of the metro stations, from the Punjabi Baroque of the shopping malls to the apartments rapidly wiping out south Calcutta?s beautiful old homes ? tackiness and lack of vision are taking over the visual experience of the city. The Lakes, the river-front, and university campuses, and public buildings like the Rabindra Sadan and the Academy of Fine Arts have all become icons of decrepitude. Their ?beauty? has less to do with the intentions of their protectors than with the beholder?s taste for the archaic and the ruined. The rebuilt bits of the gutted New Market, or the square and underground parking in front of it, tell the same sad story.

It is surely significant that there has evolved no ?Bengal School? of architecture worth speaking of, apart from the still-born Tagorean whimsies in Santiniketan. So that beautifying Calcutta is merely an exercise in conserving its colonial buildings ? architecturally, the only good things to have happened to it. All new buildings in the city, from shopping malls to nouveau riche residences, remain more or less uniformly hideous displays of private wealth or civic pride rather than of original and innovative good taste.