In 1975 when the German novelist Gunter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1999, visited India for the first time, he singled out Calcutta as a city he would definitely return to. The abject poverty in which many in Calcutta lived, juxtaposed with the throbbing vitality of the city and the tremendous will of the people to strive against the odds, evoked in Grass a strange mixture of attraction and disgust, but also left him utterly fascinated. Grass ...
