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Yes, I love Calcutta. No, I am not a native of Calcutta. My ancestors did live in Uttarpara, which is in the present-day district of Hooghly and only four stations away from Howrah (Calcutta's rail gateway, even though it is technically outside the city) at one time, they had probably not been around that place to witness the first run of the East India Railway's service from Howrah to Hooghly in 1854. It is a well documented fact that my great-great-great grandfather, the late Digambar Mukherjee, had sailed up the Ganges in a merchant boat in the 1840s and had been robbed by pirates at a place known as Garh Mukteshwar, in what is now the district Ghaziabad of the state of Uttar Pradesh and what was then in the zilla (district) of Meerut, in the subah (province) of Agra of the rapidly disappearing Mogul Empire (Agra was probably already being administered by the Hon'ble East India Company) at the time. Mr. Mukherjee, the story goes, trekked to the district headquarters about 25 miles away in Meerut Cantonment, dispossessed of all worldly possessions. In Meerut, Mr. Mukherjee sought employment at a British owned indigo plantation. When the great unrest of 1857 - what the British call the Sepoy Mutiny and what we Indians call the First War of Independence - started, Mr. Mukherjee smuggled out the British owner and his family to safety in liquor barrels, for which he was amply rewarded. The British owner bequeathed all his property in Meerut to Mr. Mukherjee, who started his own brewery.