On the average day in Calcutta, rickshaw drivers will earn 200 rupees, 70 percent of the milk consumed by its population will come from a water buffalo and all of the women will tie their saris over their left shoulders. Every year the city hosts over 500 festivals, hears 64 languages spoken on the streets and juggles 22 political parties, a select few of which often demonstrate outside the zoo.

A wild infestation of banyan trees drape themselves over a brick cityscape reminiscent of nineteenth-century England, and a mystical air emanates from the clamoring jumble of chai shops, mosques, bejeweled Jain temples, shrines and samosa stands, bedazzling city visitors.

Three years ago I promised Vinod (an alias for a friend of the reporter who wishes to remain anonymous for privacy reasons) that someday I would visit his home in Calcutta, India. I made the promise my first year in college while our friendship formed over pre-packaged, microwavable Indian food shared at three in the morning.

At the time, I assumed I wouldn’t be packing my bags anytime soon — that Vinod would follow the typical “hooked on the system,” après-graduation track and stay in the States to start out. Instead, after shedding his cap and gown he jumped on a flight back to South Asia to start a business bringing affordable renewable energy to poor communities in India.

Vinod joined the increasing number of graduates planning to start their lives outside of stars and stripes territory and inside the social sector. “Boston” and “banking” are no longer the only popular responses to the question, “So where are you headed after graduation?” First-world metropolises have fallen onto lists of have-been graduate destinations, while nontraditional “do-good” careers — and the booming nightlife in Bangkok, Beijing and Bangalore — have begun to lure young professionals in sizeable flocks.

After deciding last summer to take a year off from university life to live in China, I got a chance to make good on my promise to visit Vinod. India was just a hop over the border, and I was itching to compare these two rising world powers. Calcutta would be my first stop on the subcontinent.

Seasoned older travelers balked at my plan. “Calcutta is the cesspool of India,” they warned. “Why don’t you go somewhere nice?”

Calcutta was the first in-post of the British in India, located at the mouth of the holy Ganges River in East India in the avidly communist state of West Bengal. Calcuttans will say they would rather teach their sons poetry than business, and people worldwide know the city as Mother Teresa’s home base for her works of charity. By and large, though, the world remembers Calcutta as the site of India’s first and most violent partition riots, which broke out in 1946 between Hindus and Muslims, leaving over 4,000 dead, as well as prompting one of Gandhi’s longest hunger strikes and preceding the eventual partition of India and Pakistan.

Today, perceptions have changed. When most young adults think of India, it is Bangalore, Bombay, Bollywood and a great place to identify and address unmet social needs at the bottom of the pyramid that come to mind.

I arrived in Calcutta one night at the end of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, ready to investigate at least one destination chosen by this migratory population of young professionals. What attractions lay behind their flight from traditional corporate careers into the growing field of social enterprise, where you can make money but “do good” at the same time?

Tropical evening air settled invitingly around my shoulders as I stepped under a talisman of green chilis and lemons tacked onto the doorframe to ward off the evil eye. Inside the hallway, flickering candles and soft white lights illuminated small stone idols of the goddess Lakshmi surrounded by fresh flowers, and on the wall to my left hung a painting of Ganesh, the popular Hindu god distinguished by a wise elephant head. As I paused to stare quizzically at a Buddha figure, Vinod’s aunt offered me a glass of panna, a thick, forest-green juice made with raw mangos and a walloping dose of spices.

“Hinduism is all-inclusive,” she remarked, motioning at the figure. “We celebrate all gods and goddesses. Buddha is the ninth incarnation of Vishnu.”

Vinod wanted me to wade deeper into Calcutta’s religious communities so that I could begin to understand the myriad cultural complexities of the communities he works with. Vinod thus introduced me to Santimoy Bhattacharya, or Santi for short. A family friend and ex-history-professor-turned-professional-Calcutta-tour-guide, his business card bore the Delphic promise of “enlightenment experiences.”

His eyes glimmered behind thick glasses and his mouth was already open, rattling off facts when he greeted me.

“Calcutta has 82 hospitals, five million Bangladeshi immigrants, and did you know that the rickshaw was introduced by the Chinese after the British brought them here to work on the sugar cane crops?” Without missing a beat he lurched forward on a weathered wooden cane, and hurriedly ushered us like his children into his car. “There is no time to waste, I must show you Calcutta.”

To many people it may still seem odd that Vinod would trade in California for Calcutta. After all, he gave up paved roads traversed by purring Prii for chronically congested streets stuffed with old, puttering, yellow and white Ambassadors (British-style taxis you’ll only find in Calcutta) and clogged by imperious cattle with drooping bellies and jutting ribs.

What they must recognize is that coming to understanding and working to solve social and environmental problems — such as climate change, homelessness, unemployment or lack of access to education — demands highly complex and creative thinking. This is a huge part of the appeal to talented undergraduates choosing to pursue nontraditional careers in social entrepreneurship and public service: Difficult problems without formulaic solutions attract bright minds looking to make a living while doing good, now more than ever.

Santi’s tour makes its first stop on Rabindra Street. Hordes of bleating white goats obscure every patch of sidewalk that isn’t already occupied by men frying chapatis, twisting hot golden sugar into candies, or selling a multihued rainbow of hand-woven scarves. We pull over and step out into the baking hot tumult. This is a Muslim quarter of the city, and our visit coincides with the lead-up to the Muslim festival Eid, a religious celebration of the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, and a time to gather family for meals and to offer prayers to Allah.

Although Muslims represent a minority 13 percent in India, the country’s population of approximately 1.1 billion makes it the third largest Muslim nation in the world. Crowds of worshippers dressed immaculately in white taqiyah caps and flowing white tunics begin to sweep by us. They head north to the end of the street, where majestic green and white domes of the Nakhoda Mosque rise up on the horizon. Unlike in California, where religions are practiced privately inside buildings and mostly away from the public eye, Calcutta shares her religious life on every street corner.

A few miles down the riverbank, things suddenly grow solemn. At Judge’s Ghat, a dock just behind the train tracks, women clad in unbleached white saris with red borders wade waist-deep in the Ganges, submerging their heads three times. Men sit peacefully under the azure sky on the cement steps of the dock as barbers shave their heads bald, exposing their scalps to the relentless sun and sending long wisps of hair into the breeze. Holy men are stirring a mixture of rice and milk with jute sticks.

These mourners are performing obsique, a Hindu death ritual. The people here have lost a close family member, and have not washed for 10 days to mourn the dead. Today, however, they have come to wash their bodies in the holy Ganges. Under a wooden hut set back from the steps, Hindu priests have taken clay from the river and packed it into a flat tray, with holes placed evenly across the surface. They pour the rice and milk mixture into the holes, and bake it over an oven made of three bricks and heated by a small fire. Later, the mourning family will throw the offering into the river, perhaps along with a gold necklace or other valuable object for the dead. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll see on the Charles or the Potomac.

Like other big cities in the developing world, the intrigue of Calcutta draws on its rich and dynamic cultural experience, which contrasts sharply with the standardized, regulated, tidy and expensive world young professionals find today in Chicago, London or Zurich.

This is not to say that this new culture of young graduates does not also seek out and enjoy many aspects of more typical youth culture. Most travelers planning to backpack through India don’t pack an evening dress, let alone earrings or even a drop of mascara. So I was completely unprepared when Vinod told me we were going out to Calcutta’s newest nightclub, and if I insisted on wearing my sole pair of dusty cargo pants, I wouldn’t get in the door. We spent the night dancing to the latest Hindi pop and chatting with Vinod’s friends from high school.

Vinod spent the workday formulating plans to bring affordable renewable electricity to poor communities. But work in the social sector doesn’t necessarily mean the sacrifice of creature comforts during a year on a remote island with the Peace Corps. Instead, unique social enterprises around the world offer young professionals life-fulfilling work, the reassuring ease of checking your email via a DSL connection and the ability to buy your preferred brand of toothpaste at the nearest bazaar.

The growing attraction to young employees of careers serving the public good hasn’t only taken them abroad. The non-profit sector has grown to become the third-largest industry in the United States, and more students than ever are vying for positions with Teach for America, City Year, large foundations, or venture philanthropy firms.

Graduates’ zeal has not gone unnoticed by the more traditional sectors. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plan to foster the growth of this civic-minded culture includes introducing a tax credit to make the first $4,000 of a college education free, and then covering two-thirds of the total tuition costs for Americans who perform 100 hours of public service per year. If elected, he also intends to double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 and create five new “Corps” that address some of America’s most pressing challenges: Classroom Corps, Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, Veterans Corps and Homeland Security Corps.

In the past decade, an unprecedented amount of wealth has been transferred to the social sector from an emergent society of young philanthropists, socially responsible corporations and government. The funding has helped to build up an infrastructure ready to put this new generation to work. All of this potential to do good has made undergraduates even more antsy to put down their books and graduate.