India's cultural capital — where the trams still run, the Puja pandals rewrite themselves every October, and College Street's coffee-house conversations haven't ended since 1940.
Kolkata: traffic, pollution, urban chaos. Shantiniketan: Tagore campus, Baul singers, art galleries, cultural Bengal in peace.
Kolkata scores 8+ out of 10 in these months — if you must go, this is when:
Rabindranath Tagore's university town
Tagore's university campus — cultural Bengal without the city chaos. Baul music, Kala Bhavana art, Poush Mela fair, and the kind of intellectual atmosphere that Kolkata claims but Shantiniketan delivers.
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