The lives of Calcutta’s poor have come to be linked closely with the name of Mother Teresa, though the association is often made in a spirit for removed from the Mother’s own endless unforced love of suffering man. If the name of Satyajit Ray come to be inextricably linked to Calcutta, then there is also one other person is synonymous with that of the city – Mary Teresa Bojaxhice, famous all over the world as Mother Teresa, was born in Skopje in Yugoslavia and came to Calcutta as a sister of Loreto convent in 1929 to begin life as a teacher. The horrors of the 1943 famine and partition, which left such scars on the city, convinced Mother Teresa to leave the convent to pursue her personal mission to work for the poor of Calcutta with a total store of five Rupees. In 1950, she founded the Missionaries Of Charity. She also began to tend the sick and suffering in street & slums and in 1952 set up Nirmal Hriday (The Pure Heart), her home for dying destitute, in an abandoned dharmshala in Kalighat. Meanwhile, some dozen women of Calcutta had come to join her.

At a time when all missionary orders are dwindling, the Missionaries Of Charity find more &more aspirants every year. The Nuns in their blue bordered white sarees are a familiar sight in Calcutta, but orders has homes and institutions virtually all over the world and by common consent, the spirit of love and service has not be impaired by either institutional growth or the Mother’s own fame – the last crowned by the award of the Nobel prize for peace in 1979. The order has 418 centers around the world. In Calcutta, the most prominent, besides the original Nirmal Hriday, are Shishu Bhavan, a children’s home, Prem Dan for leprosy patients and Shanti Dan for drug addicts.

But the soul of Mother Teresa work does not lie in these material endeavors, however immense, they are at best marginal to the amelioration of urban poverty. The great task that she has declared set herself is to change men’s heart and attitudes – in her own words, ‘to help them love one another as God loves each one of them’. In a city known for its debate, dissension and polemic, she commands a great ideal of consensus. In a city where cynicism can be paramount, she represents hope and the virtues of self abnegation.