Kolkata overpass disaster

[Suff]

This is a fairly small sidebar in the news, but has a fairly personal flavour for me. Over 18 months I went to Kolkata twice for a week each time. When I came in from the airport we drove under this overpass which was in construction and then used the older overpass to head into the town.

Now Indian build quality is more about quantity than quality and backhanders of little brown bags filled with hard currency, rather than rupees which seem to have one direction to go, down.

Today I checked that nobody I know from the Linde Gas Kolkata office was involved in the accident (thankfully).

It just touched a nerve. It never looked like they were doing a particularly good job and the old overpass has more in common with a rollercoaster than with any normal highway...

[Workingman]

Ah, yes.

I flew in to Islamabad/Rawalpindi IA and thought the same.

It looked good, but there were signs that it was not of international standards.

Only a few hundred metres down the road and I was in what I expected, sad to say. Not one building had the look of permanency about it.

Fantastic food and fantastic people, but would I want to live there...?