The pavements are choked with hawkers and the air is toxic Today, when West Bengal's communist state government is wooing capital in the right and proper manner as prescribed by chairman Deng, change is palpable in Calcutta. The evidence: the swank shopping malls, the frenzy of building activity, and of course, the thousands and thousands of highly polluting cars, taxis, buses, mini-buses, two-wheelers, and lorries. One particular change, however, leaves the city much worse off: the demise of the Bengali bhadralok, who is well and truly dead. Some may argue that's not such a bad thing, because in modern-day consumerist India (if not even much earlier), the bhadralok may be regarded with both pity and contempt. There are the negative connotations of shabby gentility masquerading as social superiority when economic wherewithal has long disappeared. However, the bhadralok's positive virtues of culture, education, civic-mindedness, restraint, etc, are totally absent in modern day Calcutta, and this is turning the city into a different kind of hell. Even the new name, perfectly acceptable when spoken in Bengali, sounds barbarous when rendered in English: Kolkata, abbreviated to Kol as (respectively) the cpi-m aficionados and their camp followers would have it. And 'hellishness' goes much further and deeper. In one part, it is the new physical aspect of the city - the awful new buildings, the encroachment of the eastern wetlands, and the inevitable destruction of every green patch. But even at the most basic level, the central city is becoming daily more unliveable on account of two specific ills that could easily be addressed, but that the political authority has stubbornly set its face against it. These are first, automobile pollution which has turned the city's air into that of a gas chamber; and second, the roadside hawkers, who have taken over all the pavements. A few years ago, (Trinamool) Congress mayor Subrata Mukherjee's 'Operation Sunshine' became the cover story in Newsweek and held out the hope that the pavements of the city's main thoroughfares would at least become negotiable. But with city's Municipal Corporation coming under the communists, fresh encouragement has been provided for encroachment, and the hawkers are today bestride the helpless body of the city lying prone at their feet. The Calcutta High Court has punctually and regularly, in public interest litigation cases, handed out orders to clear the roads of hawkers since all other citizens are being held to ransom by this menace. The city's mayor, one Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, himself a lawyer (despite assuming his elected office, he continues his legal practice in the high court). It may, therefore, seem somewhat shocking as well as worrisome that he has repeatedly endorsed lawlessness. Mayor's support According to the mayor's public pronouncements, since jobs are not being created fast enough, it is natural that more and more people should choose to be 'self-employed'. An unexception