“Kolkata is the showcase of everything we hate in the world”, the ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said. Woody Allen described the city as “home of a hundred diseases” that didn’t even have a name. Many people still see Kolkata as a “dying city”. But since the onset of globalisation, this has changed tremendously. Forecasts say Kolkata is going to have a flourishing future. The former metropolis of misery is experiencing economic and social change. Kolkata is still developing - from thinking in castes to commercialisation. This is the story of a city with two souls. There is hardly a place in the world where so many extremes are so close together. It is the story of the demise and boom of Kolkata - of a journey from east to west, from the slums to the districts of the rich.