Wandering through the third arrondisement of Paris you could be forgiven for thinking it was a posh, trendy, expensive enclave for the arty-rich. There are boutiques galore, and innumerable art galleries selling bad painting and sculpture, and all sorts of small and big robberies in the shape of shops vending everything from classic French picnic-knives to super-modern office stationery. At one end of the elaaka is Place Bastille, with its tower commemorating the bravery of French citoyens who stormed the famous prison; behind the ornate tower is the newish Bastille Opera, with its grand curve of modern glass (no one preserves old monuments and traditional urban moods better than the French, and yet, no one adds new buildings and urban spaces to those old areas with more panache either), in the centre of the arrondisement is the beautifully austere Place de Vosges, a park-cum-square with perfectly uniform buildings constructed around it in the 19th century, and at one of the other boundaries is Hôtel de Ville, the grand municipal headquarters of the city. All of this is dotted with cafes, bars, bistros and restaurants, the profusion indicating that the local people and the many tourists have little better to do than to sit and drink and eat and watch others walk by — which is actually true.

But the Third district is also called the ‘Marais’, or ‘The Swamp’. Its history as an urban area is rich, and full of ups and downs. Monks reclaimed the swampy area many centuries ago, setting up monasteries once they did, then, sometime in the 17th and 18th centuries the newly rich burghers of Paris discovered it and built their ‘hôtels’ here, (‘mansions’ to those of us yoked irretrievably to English), then the area went downhill again, becoming a warren of streets which connected small factories and craftsmen’s workshops for jewellery, lace, general tailoring and the production of other goods requiring traditional skill.

The point of this fast-forward history-nuggeting is this: visiting the Marais recently, I suddenly found all sorts of comparisons popping up, odd echoes of Calcutta and stark and direct contrasts too. It wasn’t just the homeless crouching under frayed sleeping bags in the corners of the arches just off Place de Vosges, it wasn’t the beggars sitting against the walls in the brutal late-March freeze with their almost uniform cards scrawled with the words “pour manger, s.v.p (for eating, please)” and it wasn’t just the ghastly art dripping out of the little galleries. Calcutta barged into mind when a politically engaged friend started talking to me about how the neighbourhood had changed and yet not changed. “This looks like a rich area, and it is, but there are still a lot of old people who live here, working-class families who have lived here all their lives, and neither the Right nor the Socialists have any serious plans to accommodate them in their new Paris.”

Given Calcutta’s various recent slum-clearance shenanigans, both pretend-legal and downright illegal, this rang a clear bell: a mixed population, including the wealthy, the middle-class, the intellectuals with their little cottage-industries of ideas and art-products and, at the bottom, a section of craftsmen and working-class people who serve the whole teetering pile above them. Who, then, is the first to be uprooted when the hungry monster of real estate comes calling, who goes? The bottom layer, of course. In Paris, the breakdown might be a bit simpler — the Right-wing politicians would want to hand over large swathes of the city to developers, while the Socialists would intervene with their usual heavy hand of state re-organization (eventually playing into the hands of money-bags), whereas in Calcutta it might be a touch more difficult to decipher, with the Right and the so-called Left hunting in tandem.

The one major difference, of course, is that in Paris neither side, no matter who was in charge, would dream of destroying the heritage and the old architectural fabric of an area like the Marais. The rich may evict the poor but they would keep their buildings intact, the Socialists may buy up properties in bulk in some ham-handed attempt at re-jigging the housing capacity, but they would now never replace the old houses with tower-blocks (not that the city hasn’t had its experience of modern disaster in the concrete jungles around la Defense and in many of the adjoining suburbs), and the Greens — the party to which my friend belongs — would hopefully fight to keep ownership, control and planning local and in the hands of the people who would directly be affected.

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Paris invites you to dream; it invites you to think in tangents and angles and crazy alternatives; it extricates poetry from the most prosaic moments and situations like few other cities I know. This time, the bizarre weather — warm sunlight shifting to sudden hailstorms and back — also helped create a few surreal dreams, specifically of my home town.

So, in my daydreams, a Calcutta. Not dirty but not antiseptically clean either, not a nostalgia-ridden town, no network of badly restored and fake new rajbaris, but definitely divested of all the Stalinist space-rape of the last 40 years, a Calcutta that is at once spacious and intimate, that has brilliant new public design (not Paris, London or Stockholm design, no Sydney Opera House lookalikes for public urinals, but genuine ground-breaking tropical city design, exciting Calcutta design), a city with a cleansed river running through it, a city which is not just for the rich and the tourists to enjoy, a city with clean air, green parks and yet a town with bite and wit, a city of genuinely radical, cutting-edge art, a city of festivals, a city of dancing and revelry… a city where someone from some other less fortunate city could come and think, could come and be inspired to daydream about what their own town would be like, if only it were a bit more like Calcutta.