Kolkata Overpass Collapse Leaves Dozens Dead or Injured

New York Times ^ | Mar 31, 2016 | Hari Kumar and Nida Najar

[Ray76]

Rescue teams in Kolkata, India, scrambled on Thursday to retrieve scores of people believed to be trapped under a partly constructed vehicle overpass that collapsed with a deafening blast around midday.

[BobL]

“I didn’t know Calcutta is now Kolkata.”

Are you sure they’re not just using the John Kerry pronunciation?

[ken5050]

New Downtown airport?

[Rome2000]

I see stupidity on a massive level.

[PapaBear3625]

uh huh... And the India people are said to be superior in intelligence

They're not. The average IQ in India is 82.

But in a country of over a billion people, you have lots of very smart people (if you only look at the top 1%), and THOSE are the ones who get the H1B visas.

[stellaluna]

It doesn’t bother them. Indians are pretty fatalistic. If a lower castre person dies he obviously deserved it.

[stellaluna]

It’s their country. They’ve been saying Mumbai and Kolkata for a long time.

[Albion Wilde]

This is an interesting article:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jul/22/suzannegoldenberg
Apparently almost no-one lived in the city before the British occupied the area—so the attempt to deny the city’s imperial roots is to deny its real history.
In short—political correctness run amok.

As well as communism, according to your most interesting article from 1999! Thanks for the link. I have gotten used to Mumbai over the years, but this is the first I've heard of Kolkata after apparently 17 years of anti-colonial commie action over there. Amazing.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

It’s what is known in India as a flyover, a way for people to bypass heavy traffic on the street below.

[wideminded]

I looked at some pictures of Indian “flyovers” and they mostly look more or less normal, although there was another smaller collapse in Kolkata in 2013. But this one looks to have been very strangely constructed even before it fell down.