"Calcutta is often accused of wallowing in Raj nostalgia. Some think it’s never gotten over its lost glory as the second capital of the British Empire. It even has a few mini Big Bens. In 2011, Mamata Banerjee, the then newly elected Chief Minister of West Bengal launched an ambitious project to realize her dream of ""transformation,” to “turn Kolkata into London”, “with the Hooghly river ‘as the theme on the lines of the Thames’”. Within the next few years, the Hooghly river banks were cleaned, sanitized, and paved; trident lampposts were installed along the ghats; and official buildings, gate posts and railings were renovated. The initiative of reproducing, or rather superimposing, London in Kolkata is ironic, in light of the city’s colonial history. This is not only a resurrection of the colonial past, but a validation of the repetitive pattern of colonial power relations present in neo-liberal capitalist pursuits of urbanization.
But nostalgia is also currency. There are new and old retro restaurants whose businesses thrive solely on this nostalgia. They serve French and English traditional food and play the same songs that the British heard when they haunted these places over a century ago. Some call this "happy" and "profitable" nostalgia that holds together an otherwise collapsing city.
(Definition clarifications)
Resurrection - the act of bringing a dead person or thing back to life
Neo-liberalism is a economic and political philosophy that emphasises upon free trade, reduced government regulation, globalisation, among other things.