What is Calcutta going to do with its trams? When I visited the city a few months ago — my first trip back in nearly twenty years — I found disturbing signs that they were on their way out. I knew, of course, that they no longer went down Chowringhee to Tollygunge or across the bridge to Howrah; what I wasn’t prepared for was the sight of BBD Bagh, where the tracks were permanently blocked with ranks of parked Ambassadors, suggesting that the presumed needs of senior government servants had been given more importance than the transport for the public they were paid to serve. That turning loop around the tank used to be such a nice thing, trams entering one way to depart another or perhaps just the way they had come. It gave Calcutta a central European feel — in Swiss cities, where trams are taken seriously, they would spend millions of francs to achieve the same circulatory effect. But the people in Calcutta I asked about the trams all said much the same thing. “Oh, yes, we still have our trams, they are very much there.” But where were they? On the Maidan, there wasn’t a tram in sight. “Ah, you see they are repairing the line.” (How I used to like that stretch, where trams were unleashed from their halting progress through the city streets and raced like frisky dogs across the grass, towards their master in Kidderpore.) Eventually I found a small queue of them in Dharamtala Street, every car satisfyingly the same as twenty years ago, bells pinging, wheels grinding, but none so full as I seem to remember them.

That Calcutta still has trams at all is, of course, miraculous. Other Indian cities had them but Mumbai’s ran only for a couple of decades in the late 19th century, Chennai’s vanished about 1950, Delhi’s (a meagre 15 kilometres of track) in 1963. Their fall from fashion in India echoed the British pattern. In the years after World War II, trams still clanged through every major British city, but none were left by the time the Beatles released their first LP, other than the seaside trams that took holidaymakers along the shore at Blackpool. Glasgow was the last city to lose them, in 1962, and the Day of the Last Tram is still remembered there. Glasgow had a great affection for its trams — they inspired jokes, poems and comic songs — and when they went, some vital part of the city’s character was lost forever. Glasgow was a thrusting Victorian city built quickly by imperial trade — it is still the British city closest to Calcutta in terms of historical character and civic chauvinism — and trams were profoundly Victorian machines.

Calcutta got its first trams in 1873, when a line opened between Sealdah and BBD Bagh (then Dalhousie Square). It lost money and closed the same year. Then a couple of British engineers proposed an eight-route system and soon sold their concession to operate the routes to the Calcutta Tramways Company, which re-opened the Sealdah-Dalhousie line in 1880. Other lines spread throughout the city in the next decade, all powered by Waler horses, so called because they had been bred in New South Wales from British and Arab stock to cope with the demands of the hot and dry Australian outback. Even so, their labour in the Calcutta climate proved too much for many of them. As P. Thankappan Nair reports in Sukanta Chaudhuri’s fine two-volume history (Calcutta: The Living City), in hot weather Waler horses died in great numbers. Steam power was introduced, and puffing trams ran for a time across the Maidan in 1882 until the army in Fort William objected — irrationally, in the military tradition — whereupon steam was confined to the five days of Durga Puja when the trams ferried pilgrims to the temple at Kalighat. The permanent solution to exhausted horses arrived in 1902, when the whole system was electrified, a year before the first electric tram ran in London. Throughout the 20th century, extensions went on being built — to Howrah in 1943, from Maniktala to Ultadanga and Behala to Joka as recently as the mid-Eighties. That was a time, as I remember it, when there was talk of trams reaching Salt Lake and their virtues were being talked up as cheap, pollution-free alternatives to buses and cars. The World Bank even provided the cash to buy 75 new ones and renovate another 170.

And now? According to the latest CTC figures, Calcutta has 262 trams — but only 104 of them running; 29 routes — but only 16 of them operating; and 60 kilometres of track — but only 50 kilometres actually used. To me, this doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence in the future of Calcutta’s trams.

To lose them would be careless. All over the world, tramways are being revived as the most efficient and environmentally-friendly means of urban transport. Many cities in mainland Europe have plans to build completely new systems or extend existing ones. In Britain, Manchester and Sheffield have opened new tramways at vast expense to replace those they scrapped fifty years ago. Edinburgh is building a new system — I remember riding on its last trams in 1956 — and London had advanced plans for one. Even the United States of America no longer ridicules the idea of trams — and it was America where the anti-tram disease began in the Thirties when the automobile and oil interests conspired to kill them off (the story is the subject of the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit). How sad it would be if Calcutta, ignoring these wasteful lessons in the recent history of urban transport, was condemned to repeat them by conceding everything to the car. As Sukanta Chaudhuri wrote in 1990, “Common sense and ocular evidence suggest what official surveys confirm, that Calcuttans must curb their go-as-you-like spirit if they wish to move about within their native city.” The tram should be the city’s iron disciplinarian.

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Have you ever met a cultural entrepreneur? The term is relatively new, but now the world is heaving with them. What does a cultural entrepreneur do? Another way to describe him or her is “impresario, artistic director, cultural diplomat”. That’s how Pablo Ganguli is defined, perhaps by himself, in his Wikipedia entry (several times longer than that of Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, who could be reasonably described as a proper version of all the above). I’m sure I have no need to go into the detail of Ganguli’s celebrated, but short, career — the Calcutta boy, born in 1983, who, aged 17 or 18, became the partner of Britain’s then deputy high commissioner in Calcutta, who set him up as his official consort when he became high commissioner in Papua New Guinea: if the British Foreign Office ever had a reputation for quiet wisdom and reticence, it went overboard long before. Ganguli then went to Britain and there rose to some kind of fame as a promoter of literary festivals.

Earlier this month, he came a cropper when three of his temporary staff, who organized last February’s Kitab festival in Mumbai, publicly complained that they had yet to be paid and that the festival discriminated against its Indian guests, who didn’t get free travel and hotels, in favour of its British guests (including me) who did. A dozen writers (also including me) then wrote an open letter in support of his staff and consequently the London Times and other organizations withdrew their sponsorship of this year’s Kitab, again in Mumbai, which was just about to start. I imagine it was a mess and part of me feels sorry for Ganguli, who (as the saying goes) has never done me any harm. But another part of me, possibly a much larger part, feels no pity at all. There’s very little evidence that Ganguli has any knowledgeable interest in books and writers and readers or financial straightforwardness. What interests him chiefly is his own charm and its effects on the innocent. Both can be considerable. To watch him camping it up at a party is like being taken back to the age of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies; I’m certain I saw him at the Taj hotel waving a feather boa. What he believes in is “bringing amusing people together” at someone else’s expense. Free champagne is free champagne. Bollywood is Bollywood. It would be both sourly Presbyterian as well as hypocritical of me to disapprove — until one remembers the organizational shambles, the unpaid staff, the intellectual emptiness of it all.

In any case, pity for Pablo is unnecessary. I have never met anybody so young with a better understanding of what I think Saul Bellow, quoting a French writer, called the “delirious professions”: occupations where the verb ‘to be’ is more important than the verb ‘to do’. He is a completely modern figure, who knows he exists when he appears in the media. Coverage equals success — the act of being. In that way, you might argue, he is ideally suited to Bandra and Juhu, where even these mildly critical paragraphs may do him nothing but good.