The gentle tinkling of its traditional bell sounds delightful amidst the cacophony of Calcutta traffic - with its ever increasing numbers of cars, taxis, lorries and motorbikes, all seeming to compete to blare their horns loudest and longest.
But turn around and the sight that greets you is far from delightful. A skinny, often elderly, usually barefoot man dragging a hand-pulled rickshaw - a shafted cart with a high seat atop two giant wooden wheels.
It is the same India portrayed in the film City of Joy, made in the slums of Calcutta in 1991, but it is not an image the new India wants the world to see.
The central character of the film was a rickshaw-puller, one of the city's fleet of tens of thousands of "human horses", as they are called. More...
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