Chai and cigarettes (Sutta) is a match made in paradise.
Have you at any point felt that occasionally two entirely irrelevant things now
and again fall in imperfect but cooperative energy? Indeed, Chai and sutta are
one of them. Obviously, these are unusually different things - Chai is probably
the most beneficial drink out there, while cigarettes just harm your body. There
is particularly no science behind this combination. They just happen to be made
for each other. These are two of the most addictive things I know of (being a
chai addict myself).
It is from here that the Bengali term adda has emerged and
one that defies translation. Are you making conversation? No, that’s too formal. Adda is not made. It just is. To be true adda,
it has to flow freely. I don’t know why
we never say we are “doing”
adda or “making”
adda, we mostly “maro” adda. There's something easygoing and somewhat illicit
about a genuine adda. It is a chance stolen for the sheer joy of sitting down
and discussing anything and everything under the sun. To be a decent adda
session it must not be intended to have any saving grace whatsoever. It is the
long winding street to discovering the importance of life.
Being brought up in Calcutta, adda was inevitable. Usually,
a huge group of people would gather around a dhaba or a tea stall, occupy all
the wooden benches and just sit and talk without any count of the amount of
chai they’ve had or cigarettes they’ve smoked. As I grew up, the concept adda
changed along with the people who sat together for adda sessions. From fervent
discussions about politics, economics and even other people it has turned to
youngsters meeting at a dhaba or tea stall, sitting playing music on their
phones, texting and using social media but there is no one to initiate any
conversation. But that’s just us millennials, who prefer interacting virtually
rather than in person.
I recall the working class men who used to gather around a tapri
every morning. They would read the daily paper, adjusting their teacups, and
articulate judgment on the world, the neighborhood football group, Communism
and the legislative issues in the nearby Durga Puja board of trustees. The street
dogs would stick around sitting tight for a layer of bread or half a biscuit.
As kids we would string our way between these "uncles" as we went to
school. The adda would part for us and afterward would resume behind us again
consistently.
In Kolkata, adda is inescapable. Although every Tapri, dhaba
and tea shop is still bustling and have jazzed up crowd pleasers like momos and
biryani. The pavements have shrunk and there isn’t any place for people to walk
because hawkers and chai wallahs have taken up most of it. All the adda baaz crowd
has to sit on wobbly plastic chairs or dilapidated wooden stools on the edge of
the street with their newspapers, balancing their teacups precariously. But
it’s the last stand of the great public adda in every little neighbourhood in
old Calcutta.
Change is inevitable. We hold the world in the palm of our
hands now. The new medium for adda is the mobile phone. Our adda happens over social
media. There’s no real conversation happening. Now as the spaces for adda are
endangered and the time for it in short supply, there is a great sense of loss
for it. But that’s the sentimentality that nostalgia breeds. Adda was not
always regarded with such favour by our families. It was what kept us in
canteens and cafeterias instead of going home. It was housemaids gossiping
about scandals in the homes where they worked. And when the men of the
neighbourhood gathered for the evening adda, our mothers and grandmothers
sighed, for it was they who would have to make the endless cups of tea and
snacks to fuel it. For some, adda was not just time-pass, it was time-waste.
The old adda is fading because that luxury of time is gone.
But it still happens in the dive bars of the city, on the grounds of the Nandan
film complex, around carrom boards in front of clubhouses, and sometimes even
in the synthetic brightness of the chain coffee shop. What's more, if nothing
else, it still imparts
the
most significant lesson an adda can teach you –
that you can argue, and argue eagerly, about everything, but meet up again the
following day, and the day after that. In this time of awful trolling, that may
very well be more significant than the importance of life itself.
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