Now when I come to think of it thus college mates whom I chatted with (hot arguments) alll had Bengali connection. Some were from there or from Orissa with a "Das" or "Bose" surname or had lived there or had origins from there. South Indian did not talk much but were ataunch too.
Umesh
PS: Assamnet is like that too. Technically, here at Harvard, it is called co-construction of knowledge. The best way to develop understanding about an issue
Ram Sarangapani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ram Sarangapani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We have dealt some serious discussions, so I thought it would lighten
things up a bit on this interesting article on 'Adda'. I suppose all
netters here know what adda is. The scene is Calcutta, so many of you
who studied or worked in Calcutta can probably relate to this article.
It might as have been Guwahati.
Growing up all my life in Guwahati, addas were a big thing for us too.
As I look back, we used to have 'intellectual' discussions (at least
we thought they were) or politics. In the end, whether anything came
out of those addas, one thing is sure, I did make many friends (some
even to this day).
In a way, Assam net is also like having addas. Its thrilling,
entertaining, pick up a few things here and there, and exchange views.
I still miss those days in the Madhimita/Kalyani or GU canteen or some
other cha-dukan solving the ! world's problems, with hot singars and
cups of bad tea. Yes, I miss those adda-maara days.
It would be great to hear experiences of other netters.
--Ram
************
May 15, 2005
The Chattering Masses
By PETER TRACHTENBERG
Some facts you had better get used to: you will never get to eavesdrop
on Sartre and Genet at the Cafe de Flore, or watch Irving Howe and
Philip Rahv getting worked up about Roth and Mailer at the Tip Toe Inn
on the Upper West Side. And if you wander into Le Figaro Cafe you
won't find Kerouac and Ginsberg hollering at each other in holy
ecstasy -- just some N.Y.U. kids talking about relationships.
But the tradition of freestyle intellectual conversation lives on in
Calcutta. The city (officially renamed Kolkata in 2001) has an oral
culture as lively and cerebral as that of 1950's New York or Paris.
Bengalis love to talk, especially about exalted topics (the notion
that some topics are exal! ted still holds currency there, even among
postmodernists).
And they have enshrined that love in adda, a kind of eclectic and
often fiercely erudite conversation that originated among the upper
classes but became democratized, thanks to universities, bookstores
and coffeehouses. ''If you ask a Bengali what he is fond of,'' Suman
Chattopadhyay, a producer at Star Anand TV News, told me, ''he will
say rasgulla, which is a sweetmeat, Tagore's songs and adda.''
The word adda (pronounced AHD-da) is ''a place'' for ''careless talk
with boon companions,'' as the scholar Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay
puts it, and sometimes as ''the chat of intimate friends.'' Another
scholar, Vipesh Chakrabarty, writes, ''Roughly speaking, it is the
practice of friends getting together for long, informal and unrigorous
conversations.''
Of course, all these terms are subject to debate. Take ''long.'' The
journalist Subir Bhaumik reports that some older ! members of his
swimming club start their adda at 6 in the morning and are still at it
when the place closes for lunch. An adda at the last Calcutta Book
Fair is said to have gone on for five days.
As far as informality goes, the addas at the tony Center of
International Modern Art (CIMA) are invitation-only and dedicated to
specific topics. And can a conversation whose participants score
points by reciting poetry really be called unrigorous? Bengalis assure
me that addas may also include talk about job and family, but I
suspect this is like a serious eater taking a little sherbet to clear
his palate between the braised sea bass and the truffled sweetbreads.
(An adda, incidentally, nearly always involves the eating of fried
savories like samosas and bhaji, or the rococo sweets that Bengalis
call mishti.)
Tell a Calcuttan you went to his or her city looking for good talk,
and there is a moment of incomprehension, followed by re! lief. The fear
is that you will bring up Mother Teresa, who did a lot for the poor,
according to the consensus, but dealt a body blow to the city's
reputation, engendering an entire industry of squalor -- and
uplift-tourism. Of course, there is squalor here, and poverty to gnash
your teeth over. But the city also has legions of purposeful,
well-dressed office workers; street chefs frying bhaji on propane
stoves; vendors of saris, tube socks, counterfeit Nike bags and fresh
papayas; and august old men in shalwar kameez that give them the sleek
silhouette of an automobile hood ornament. Calcuttans might not want
to talk about their presumptive saint, but when I asked them about
adda, they wouldn't shut up.
''Adda is something typically Bengali,'' said the tiny, patrician Dr.
Krishna Bose, a retired English literature professor at the University
of Calcutta and a former member of Parliament. She is related by
marriage to the Bengali indep! endence leader Subhas Chandra Bose, which
gives her pronouncements on the national character a definitive
quality. ''It is something very spontaneous. The club life that the
British have, that is not adda. It cannot be 50 people together. That
becomes a meeting. So it should be three persons minimum, because if
you have two that also is not an adda.''
Amithabha Bhattasali, a BBC reporter, believes that two people can
have a perfectly decent adda, while the sisters Rakhi Sarkar and
Pratiti Basu Sarkar, who run the events at CIMA, say that their addas
typically draw 20 or 30 people. Most cognoscenti would say that the
CIMA events don't qualify as true adda, since there is a program of
topics. ''The thing about an adda is that it moves fluidly,'' Bhaumik
insisted. ''You could be discussing Charles and Camilla's marriage
this moment, and the next moment you're swinging over to the latest
cricket series between India and Pakistan, and then s! wing back to the
recent controversy over Tagore.''
During my stay in Calcutta, I began to feel that I was taking part in
a never-ending adda about adda. The participants were scattered
throughout the city, and I scurried back and forth among them,
relaying an opinion and having it accepted or elaborated upon or shot
down. Of course, everyone had an idea of what constituted a real adda.
Was it peasants chatting at sundown by the Kali temple; the pensioners
gabbing at Bhaumik's club; the tailors and goldsmiths opining by the
tea stalls on Ganguly Road; the literary heavyweights who meet every
Wednesday to discuss the arts?
The one thing everyone agreed on was that the best addas were the ones
held at coffeehouses, near Presidency College, at the University of
Calcutta, the city's (and maybe India's) most revered academic
institution. Bose had partaken of them as a student in the 50's (she
recalled a professor whose seminars on Milton! had lasted so long as to
necessitate two addas). The other thing people agreed on was that
those addas were a thing of the past. College students today were too
obsessed with their grades.
So when I went to the student coffeehouse, it was with low
expectations. Nearby College Street is an uninterrupted corridor of
used-book stalls; on this Friday evening all of them were thronged.
The crowds and the lurid glow of the bookshops' lamps gave the street
the feel of a carnival midway. The coffeehouse was on a side street.
As I climbed a dank stone staircase, I heard a hum that might have
been a generator, but when I rounded the corner it became apparent it
was the sound of people talking. There seemed to be hundreds of them.
I couldn't be sure because the room was so dark. In the
tobacco-colored gloom, people sat at tiny tables built for one or two,
but some had six people squeezed around them, gesticulating through a
haze of cigarett! e smoke. (Seeing so many smokers at large was itself
exhilarating.)
I zeroed in on a rangy, bespectacled man in his 30's who seemed to be
discussing something heavy with two older companions and introduced
myself. ''So let me ask you, are you having an adda?''
''Adda? Yes, this is an adda.''
''And what are you talking about?''
''We are writers,'' the ringleader announced grandly. His name was
Sarosij Basu. ''I am a very simple and very marginal writer. I publish
a magazine, a little magazine. We only publish local writers, in
Bengali.''
He showed me a copy that was bound with staples. Another writer, Dilip
Ghosh, translated Dostoyevsky from English into Bengali. Basu had
published an issue of his translations and critical articles. All 400
copies had sold out. Everybody at the table loved Dostoyevsky. Also
Joyce Carol Oates and the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso, whom they
saluted as their guru.
Our conver! sation went on for two hours and moved from Dostoyevsky to
the blockade of Leningrad to Cioran to Calasso to Indian mythology to
the demographics of Calcutta to the vagaries of the United States
publishing industry. I suppose that made it a true adda. When I
finally tugged myself away, I was tired and hoarse, but my brain
seemed to be crisscrossed by new neural pathways, all of them roaring
with conceptual traffic. On the basis of this experience, I would say
that the coffeehouse adda is still thriving and that this is a good
thing. But I should add the caveat of another man who joined our group
and bemoaned the undisciplined spirits who spend their entire lives
engrossed in adda: they ruin their kidneys with endless cups of coffee
and their lungs with cigarettes, and their lives recede from them like
mirages while they go on ceaselessly adda-fying.
''So you think adda is an addiction?'' I asked him.
''Adda,'' he answered, ''is a profession.''
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