Will Mamata Banerjee make blue a defining shade for Kolkata

Mamata Banerjee appears to have decided to do a metoo on Jodhpur, of all cities, by daubing Kolkata in shades of blue. For her, Kolkata may have become the real pink city — on the inside, just like the watermelon she likened crypto-communists to — in the past 20 years and not Jaipur that has been blushing ever since the flirtatious future Edward VII arrived there in 1876.

Still, aspiring to make her bursting megalopolis like Rajasthan’s modest second city instead of the Raj’s first city London, does not seem logical. Not that the West Bengal chief minister is known for cool consideration, but even she would surely not wring out Rs 80 crore from the state’s shrivelled resources to paint moss-coated public buildings and grimy civic amenities for the paltry reward of wresting the Blue City tag from Jodhpur. Could her real inspiration be Oman’s $20-billion Blue City that promised to rise from the desert in a welter of glitzy malls and marinas, hotels and hospitals? Stalled due to spats, debts, recession and mismanagement (leading to a government takeover of the project), it is now truly feeling blue, and should serve as a cautionary tale for Ms Banerjee.

The move to offer private building owners tax incentives to use the same shade raises the alarming spectre of a monochromatic city, that too not artistically black-and-white like a classic Satyajit Ray film. As an artist of some energy if not an aesthete, she probably sets great store by colour, and even Picasso had a Blue Period but it is hardly a shade for the times, given its modern connotation of depression and moodiness. Despite blue being the hue of the sky — the proudly stated limit for her ambitious government — green (the designated shade of her Poriborton movement) would be more au courant, if not any less desirable.