Mother Teresa The Untold Story

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Dr. Aroup Chatterjee was born and brought up in Calcutta. He now lives and works (as a physician) in London. He was, if anything, positively inclined towards Mother Teresa while he was living in Calcutta, though he knew little about her. Upon coming to the West he was appalled at the Teresan mythology and at the gruesome image that his home-city had in the world. He has done research on Mother Teresa for over twenty-five years and can be called the world's foremost authority on the late nun. He has appeared numerous times on BBC and other world media to discuss his subject. He is married and has three children.

Mother Teresa once made me cry. The year was 1988 and I was on one of my frequent visits back to Calcutta after moving to Britain in 1985. I was standing by the kerbside at Gariahat crossing, munching on the famous mutton roll'. I was looking at scenes I had grown up with: pavements almost obliterated by shops, people having to weave their way through hawkers peddling their fares, buses belching out black diesel smoke, tilted to one side by the sheer weight of passengers, trams waiting for a manual change of tracks before they could turn, and the familiar neon sign of an astrologer.

In the midst of all this, I remembered the 'Calcutta' as perceived by the West; Calcutta the metaphor, not the city. In my three years in the West I had come to realise that the city had become synonymous with the worst of human suffering and degradation in the eyes of the world. The imagined Calcutta contained a multitude of 'sewers and gutters' where endless numbers of dead and dying people lay; but they did not lie for long, as 'roving angels' in the shape of the followers of a certain nun would be seeking them. Then they would whisk them away in their smart ambulances. In my twenty-seven continuous years in Calcutta I had never seen such a scene and neither had I met a Calcuttan who had.