The “dense crowds, shoulder to shoulder”, at Howrah station; the escape into the idyllic world of Pandora in Avatar

“It looks like a cross between THX-1138 and a Calcutta train station.”

— James Cameron, describing Avatar’s Earth in 2154.

The costliest film ever made may have chugged out of a Calcutta station.

The “crowded, grey… squalor” that marks the city’s platforms (and more) has played a crucial behind-the-scenes part in inspiring the $300 million epic on the dream planet called Pandora.

Page One of James Cameron’s 146-page scriptment (script treatment) of Avatar, penned in the 1990s, opens the Pandora’s box: “It is a century from now, and the population of our tired planet has tripled…. The Earth is dying, covered with a grey mould of human civilisation…. It’s the same crowded, grey, trash-strewn... squalor. The walls are grey, the sky is grey... the people are grey. They shuffle past each other in dense crowds, shoulder to shoulder, unwashed... sickly....It looks like a cross between THX-1138 and a Calcutta train station.”

The first parallel refers to the dystopian world of the future as seen in George Lucas’s 1971 debut feature THX-1138. The second refers to the world we seem resigned to live in.

So what made the “Calcutta train station” the symbol of Cameron’s Earth in an advanced state of decay, an Earth that must be escaped? The grey mould, the trash-strewn squalor or the dense crowds shuffling past each other, unwashed and sickly?

The Titanic maker could not be contacted, but some would say all of the above.

Try telling that to Mamata Banerjee’s railway army. “The conditions at Howrah, Sealdah and other suburban stations have improved over the past few years. They have become cleaner and even visitors from abroad have praised Howrah and Sealdah, that have been converted to model stations,” said an Eastern Railway official.

The custodians of these two stations — who would like “James Cameron to visit them once before condemning them” — cannot argue about the overcrowded bit, though. Howrah and Sealdah have a daily average footfall of 10 lakh each. “The passenger count is rising alarmingly and the crowd dispersal system is a problem,” said an official.

The Calcutta crowd has been lapping up all the eye-popping visual effects since Thursday at the multiplexes, contributing to the record Rs 22 crore gross collection of Avatar in its first weekend in India.

But Calcuttans escaping into the idyllic world of Pandora, 4.4 light-years from Earth, are unaware that it has been designed as a visual anti-thesis to their own city.

“While watching the film I didn’t realise that Pandora is the opposite of my Calcutta,” said director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury. “Pandora is beautiful but unreal. Calcutta is real with its own character.”