I was lucky to have visited India during the “Spring Festival of Playing Holi” or the “Festival of Colors.” It is a Hindu festival that is celebrated by smearing, or throwing, colored chalk at others and then spraying water to make the colors run. Everyone is fair game. The trip left me with a lasting sense of spiritualism and beauty. I felt peace and harmony as never before. Even though there is obvious poverty in many regions of the country, there is still a sense of contentment you can’t find anywhere else.

In 1896, almost a century before Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala caused a stir by daring to show a romance between a black man and an Indian woman in the American South, a Muslim Bengali peddler from Hooghly married a black Catholic woman from New Orleans and settled down in that city. There’s no record of how they met or what the neighbors made of them. Shaik Mohammad Musa died in 1919, a few months before his son was born. His widow Tinnie raised their three children as black and Catholic. Their Indian heritage was lost in history.

West Bengal’s chief minister promised to turn Calcutta into London. But Joss Whedon in the Marvel comics saga, The Avengers, has gone backwards instead. Calcutta in the age of superheroes looks suspiciously like the one described in the City of Joy circa 1985 – cramped, squalid and leprous. Mark Ruffalo is Dr. Bruce Banner, keeping his inner Hulk under control by saving the eternally ill slum-dwellers of Calcutta.