Kolkata: Raising a voice of dissent as the world prepares to celebrate Mother Teresa's beatification on October 19, a hostile witness who had deposed before enquiry into Mother's life, on October 16 said that she had done "more harm than good' to the image of the City of Joy abroad, especially in the West.

''In my opinion, Mother Teresa has done more harm than good to Kolkata's image abroad, especially in the West. It seems to me that she needed the city more than it needed her,'' Aroup Chatterjee, a Kolkata-born doctor settled in England, said.

Chatterjee, who had deposed as hostile witness at the inquiry into Mother Teresa's life and virtues in London, said, ''Ever since I went to England and travelled to other countries in the West, people looked upon me as an oddity - a doctor from the world's ultimate hell-hole.''

Persistent confrontations with his native city's negative image in the West has prompted Chatterjee to write 'Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict', a treatise on activities of the Missionaries of Charity and its foundress.

This image, he said, was the result of persistent media coverage of Mother Teresa and activities of the Missionaries of Charity, that depicted the Nobel laureate nun and sisters of her order as the ultimate saviour of the city teeming with leprosy patients and groveling in poverty.

Even small Western businesses did not scout in Kolkata because of the city's negative image which neither Mother nor her organisation had tried to allay, Chatterjee alleged.

''When a businessman friend from Kolkata came visiting me in London, one of my neighbours, a Polish lady, took half a day off from work just to see my friend. She was a Teresa devotee and could not believe there could be a businessman in Kolkata,'' he said.

Chatterjee's book, which has received an excellent press in the West, deals with, among other things, the process of creation of "myths" around Mother Teresa, her accounting policies, her politics, her relation with Kolkata, views from within her homes, profiles of Kolkata's destitutes based on extensive interviews and a comparison of her organisation's work with that of other religious and secular charities.

''I wrote the book to set the record straight since I realised that admiration for Mother Teresa is based less on facts and more on the domino effect of myth-making. She was a lover of poverty, rather than the poor. She once said to a woman in pain: Jesus is loving you. But she herself received the best care possible,'' he said.

Encouraged by the success of his book, Chatterjee is in the process of creating a network of sympathisers who would work in projecting the reality that Kolkata is not all slums, leper colonies and hunger and that Mother Teresa's is not the only charity organisation working in the metropolis.

An avowed aetheist, Chatterjee has no objection to Mother being beatified or canonised in keeping with Roman Catholic canon law. ''She subscribed to a religious point of view and it is up to the clergy of that religion to decide what to do with her. I myself am not against her becoming a Catholic saint. I said this in my deposition in London on January 3 and 4, 2001.''

PTI