Café culture rules Kolkata
Shaadaab S. Bakht
@ShaadaabSBakhtShaadaab S. Bakht, who worked for famous Indian dailies The Telegraph, The Pioneer, The Sentinel and wrote political commentaries for Tehelka.com, is Gulf Today’s Executive Editor.
The photo has been used for illustrative purposes.
…Best lessons come not from uniformed attendance, but from wild cafe sessions.
The photo has been used for illustrative purposes.
It’s only in such places that we are surrounded by people who allow us to talk freely, people who hit back when we are wrong, people who support our excesses, people who play the leader when required, people who play the follower when required and people who speak the truth to bail us out when we are in trouble.
And it is in such cafes that knowledge pleasantly becomes wisdom and a writer or an artiste or a political rebel or a crook or a moralist or a rationalist or a romantic is born. In short, the foundations of our lives are laid.
The lucky ones get a chance to visit such coffee sessions, the unlucky ones don’t. They wait for some prejudice-laden writer to tell them about human beings and life.
I consider myself to be very lucky. I belong to a gang, which fed itself just on views: predictably at the top was amorous romance, but not amoral; second was football and cricket; third was rebellious philosophy; fourth was religion; fifth was human suffering and last was whether the heaviest book was indeed the chequebook?
For us it all began at a coffee corner called Coffee Cabin, Calcutta (now Kolkata). The trigger for the rendezvous was, your guess is right, the swarthy and vivacious counter clerk and inexpensive coffee.
She, however, left in a couple of weeks, but the joint became our parliament, taken to thrilling heights by a serious agnostic, a pair of jilted lovers, a heartless prankster and an incurable rationalist, for the next five years.
The coffee corner was located in a dingy room at the end of an archway, with busts in all the staircase windows of Swami Vivekananda, Raja Rammohun Roy, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Uttam Kumar and local icons.
In the same building were located a typist, a cigarette-seller and a signboard painter.
The room, which in size and situation, took precedence over all the rest was the coffee shop.
The door of the shop was always open and the hall was blocked with a grand, but unclean partition and several musical instruments looking rakish in the daylight. We were told that the shop was set up by a man whose only love was music, but he could not realise his dream and found refuge in selling coffee.
The place had a washroom, which was like an enlarged mew lighted primarily by skylight.
Scores of youngsters, ranging from 17 to 25 years, were regulars like us. Some of them subsequently went on to win international awards.
The common denominator of all the sessions was our faith in arguments and in focusing not only on the now, but also on a serious attempt at an ethically nourishing tomorrow.
Many years later three of that group landed in Dubai and immediately wanted to create an “adda” or a rendezvous.
They were very happy to meet at a cafe on the Sharjah corniche. The gang now has a Sufi-like romantic with a serious interest in poetry and paintings.
It has been made richer by the presence of a guy, who neither belongs to our part of India nor speaks our language, but has become the irreplaceable nerve-centre. He is our fountainhead of rationality. We also have a silent listener. We are determined to keep the café culture alive because nothing can replace the joy of a face-to-face meeting.
