In The Beginning, There Was The Bengali

Adda, a Bengali invention, has travelled far and wide across the world. By the 4th century BC, it had already reached Athens, where Socrates established himself as the leading addabaj . At henians obviously were not as smart as Bengalis, so they accused the ex-stonemason of corrupting the youth and condemned him to death. A picture of Socrates' adda can be drawn from Plato's writings.

Shakespeare and Ben Jonson met for their regular ale-greased adda at the Mermaid Tavern in London. In the 18th century, a celebrated adda grew around Dr Samuel Johnson, whose magazines, The Idler and The Rambler,clearly hint at their free-flowing procrastinative source. Members included William Pitt, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick. Around this time, women of learning too started meeting at Mrs Montague's house to discuss culture and literature. This group came to be known as the Bluestockings. Across the Channel, in France, the addas at cafes around the country were instrumental in the flowering of the French Revolution.

In the 19th century, the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, and essayists Hazlitt and Charles Lamb had a famous adda. In the 1880s, Tuesday evenings at Mallarme's Paris house drew people like Gide, Claudel and Valery. Early this century, Yeats set up the Rhymers Club which met at the Cheshire Cheese pub in London's Fleet Street area. And of course, the Bloomsbury group, whose leading lights were Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Keynes, Forster, and sometimes Russell, Huxley and Eliot. The Bengali idea has travelled to the US too. In the '30s, a group of creative people—Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and the Marx brothers, among others—would meet for lunch every day at the Algonquin in New York, and came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table.

?Manojendu Majumdar, founder-member of the Calcutta Film Society and member of Ray's adda, remembers the guide on a tourist bus in Paris mentioning that the bus was just passing Cafe Mange, where Camus and Sartre thrashed out existentialism and the questions of absurdness and suicide for years. Over protests of dozens of bemused American tourists, Majumdar stopped the bus, and just walked around the tables in the empty cafe for a few minutes. "It was tremendously exciting to just think that these two men had sat right here and drunk their coffee and argued for hours. But I suppose only a Bengali will appreciate that."