Esplanade Metro Railway Station Entrance (Kolkata)

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Calcutta does have one symbol of modern cities, though. It stays remarkbly clean and to see it, you have to be headed downstairs, under Chowringhee.

Yes, a subway: India's first. Since 1995, it has operated on a 10-mile, north-south route; an additional 50 miles await construction.

Why did subways come first to Calcutta? The answer may be that the city has the country's worst road congestion. Why? Not because it has the most vehicles but because roads cover less than 5% of Calcutta's surface area; in Delhi, by contrast, roads cover 25%. Calcutta's congestion is so bad that many one-way streets change direction at different times of day; even so, taxis coming in from the airport avoid bottlenecks by using lanes so narrow that passengers can't believe they're on the way to the city center. It's an especially atavistic experience late at night.