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| Park Street was all lights, camera and action over the Christmas week with revellers old and young, like these girls in Santa Claus caps (in picture above, by Pradip Sanyal) who hit party street on Saturday night to soak in the atmosphere of celebration and revival |
Park Street has rediscovered the spirit of Christmas and Calcutta the soul of Park Street this festive season, watched over by a Santa Claus who lives not in the North Pole but in the city’s aspirations.
The canopy of multi-hued rice lights strung horizontally from one end to the other, the shimmering LED panels, trees adorned with spiral strings of illumination, the huge Christmas tree at the Camac Street crossing, and the pavements teeming with revellers — this was a Park Street combining the best of old and new.
This was also a Park Street that many saw as a metaphor for what Calcutta aspires to be.
After all, this was the first Christmas that the government had spent money — Rs 60 lakh was the total budget for the December 18 and 25 events — on lighting up the city’s party street.
“The idea was to revive the spirit of Park Street. We aspire to turn Calcutta into a carnival destination like Goa,” tourism minister Rachpal Singh told Metro.
The December 18 Calcutta Christmas Festival and the Park Street Carnival on Christmas Day will be annual events, both part of a larger strategy to revive Calcutta as a tourist destination by focusing on its unique selling points.
“Christmas is a time for celebration for the whole of Calcutta. We hope to reach out to more people next winter,” added Singh.
It isn’t a coincidence that the December-January period is when the migratory birds (read NRIs) usually return to the city in droves for their annual holidays.
Trinamul’s Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien, the brain behind the Calcutta Christmas Festival, insisted the initiative was more about reviving the spirit. “The festival was about resurgence, and resurgence is not just about infrastructure, health and education; though they are vital, it also needs to be from the soul,” he said.
For many Calcuttans, the initiative is a simple trick the erstwhile Left Front government missed. “The Christmas campaign on Park Street has come at a time when serious doubts about this government being an agent of paribartan have crept into most of our conversations,” said an industrialist and “a Park Street fan”, on condition of anonymity. “Hopefully, lighting up Park Street will spark some more changes,” added the Xaverian.
Anurag Hira, the advertising veteran who helped brand the Calcutta Christmas Festival, said decking up Park Street was in the spirit of “let there be light when there is gloom”.
The gloom is, of course, all around: Bengal failing to attract any investment worth the name over the past decade, Mamata Banerjee’s fixation with politics of populism, and the best young brains moving out of what many see as an “old-age home”.
It’s a different matter that some, like Amitabh Bachchan, would rather be in Calcutta than anywhere else for Christmas. A nostalgic Big B tweeted on Sunday about how the festival always reminded him of his former city. “Merry Xmas! The midnight mass in churches and cathedrals take one back to times gone by….Park Street in Calcutta, the parking lot for all the restaurants in a row, buzzing, celebrating... what an atmosphere!!” he wrote.
Bachchan would be glad to know that his — and Calcutta’s — favourite street is back to celebrating Christmas the way it used to. And with everything official about it.
Till last year, lighting up a pocket of Park Street was the business of the Apeejay Group. “We have always been at the forefront in organising Christmas festivities on Park Street. The effort now is to rejuvenate the spirit of the street and promote brotherhood in a much bigger way,” said Vijay Dewan, the managing director of Apeejay Surrendra Park Hotels.
To economist Abhirup Sarkar, Christmas on Park Street this year was more a revival of a glorious Calcutta tradition than a business initiative. “It might be an effort by the government to attract tourism, but what I appreciate more is the effort to hold up a unique tradition of Calcutta,” he said.
Those behind the Christmas initiative see the revival of Park Street as an “oasis of optimism” going on to become a symbol of Calcutta’s second coming.
Minister Singh and MP O’Brien promise a better and bigger show next year, one that will showcase Calcutta’s festive season as “up there” with celebrations in the best cities across the world.
Young Roshni Ali is already looking forward to it. “I love the inclusive feeling about Christmas in Calcutta. In India, after Goa, the second best place to celebrate Christmas is this city. Kudos to the ministry of tourism, I am glad to see them being involved. At least someone is making an effort to get the city out of its ennui,” said Roshni, a student of St. Xavier’s College.
