I went out the next day with Nandan and we Sarukh and Abdul and they said they would show us around Kolkata. They pointed out different things and played frisbee in a park on our way to the Victoria Memorial, which was easily the best-presented museum I have yet seen in India due to the pieces on display being well-selected and having good explanations about why they were being shown and how they relate to the other places. It was a trip being somewhere that felt so British. A little thing which stood out to me was that there was a frieze on the outside to the left of the main door showing some British people signing some documents at a table. To me, this seems like a great subject for commemorative art, but I knew Nandan would find it odd and he did. It was a great illustration of the importance which my culture places on contractual agreements and another way to solidly hit home to both Nandan and me why Indians and Westerners often have problems.
There was another cultural clash there. Unfortunately I have no picture because Nandan was learning how to use the focus on his camera, and the pictures he took were not clear. There were these putti faces in bronze on marble everywhere – search for “Victoria Memorial cherub” to see pictures. These had recently been painted flat black for some reason. If anyone had intent to preserve the British style, this was a bad attempt at site maintenance because the polished metal look is necessary. But worse that that, the person hired to paint the metal was a typical day laborer, and this person took no care not to splash paint on the marble or on the edge where the bronze met the metal. There were full brushstrokes on the marble which I am sure were intended only to cover the sides of the bronze, and because Indian housepainters habitually use no painters tape or take any care to have a sharp divide between what gets painted and what does not. Nandan’s house has the same problem in places.