Counterpoint: The Healing Power of Kolkata’s Adda
By Vivekanand Jha*
“If anyone is depressed, take him or her to Kolkata; his depression will evaporate in no time,” observed Amitabh Bachchan on the television show Kaun Banega Crorepati.
Behind this casual remark lies a deeper cultural truth. Kolkata possesses a peculiar medicine against despair—its Adda culture, where conversation itself becomes therapy and argument turns into celebration.
To speak of Adda is to invoke the Coffee House on College Street. The very name summons the presence of towering figures—Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal—as if their voices still hover over chipped cups of coffee and smoke-stained tables. Even Manna De immortalised this space in his song Coffee Houser Adda ta aar sae nai. The lyric did not mourn celebrities alone; it mourned a collective spirit. That is why it endures—because it belongs to everyone.
My own initiation into Adda did not happen at Coffee House, but on Satish Mukherjee Road in Rashbehari, at a place we affectionately called the Rock. To career-minded observers, Adda was a moral failing: young men squandering time in idle talk, wasting the money their parents earned with sweat. It appeared an indulgence, even a vice.
But from inside the circle, Adda glowed with a different light. We were a band of youthful musketeers, hovering on the edges of academic ambition and parental anxiety. Studies mattered little; neither did failure frighten us. The Rock became a second home, echoing with laughter and restless debate. Conversations ignited into arguments; arguments into quarrels; quarrels, on rare afternoons, into fisticuffs. Those sunlit hours remain the most luminous chapters of our wandering youth in the great metropolis.
Only those who have tasted Adda, even briefly, understand its strange exhilaration. To outsiders, it looked like foolishness; to us, it was freedom.
In time, I believe, the Adda of Rashbehari will claim its own place in history. The Rock will find its pedestal as years turn into decades. One day it may even rival the legendary Coffee House itself.
Yet the two were never the same. Coffee House cultivated intellectual deliberation—measured, cerebral, almost ceremonial. Rashbehari was volcanic. Everything under the sun became material for debate. The terror of losing an argument sharpened tempers and multiplied volleys of words. This argumentative spirit once followed me into an ACCA classroom in Delhi, where a black woman from South Africa branded me, without provocation, an “Argumentative Indian.” Curious pedestrians gathered and muttered, “Baba, Ma, der anna ta ke dhansa korche”—rascals destroying their parents’ hard-earned money.
At Rashbehari, no subject escaped our scrutiny. We debated the girl next door and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, her successor and the rivalry between Maradona and Pele, the bat slipping from Sunil Gavaskar’s hands and the demolition of Babri Masjid, the elopement of lovers and the fate of nations.
Football sharpened divisions further. Matches between East Bengal and Mohan Bagan split friendships into camps. I stood with East Bengal, inspired by Surojit Sen Gupta and his famous goal against South Korea—so reminiscent of Diego Maradona’s historic strike against England, later christened the “Hand of God.” Maradona’s dribbling, and the symbolic avenging of the Falklands War on the football field, entered our rhetoric as metaphors for history itself.
Amitabh Bachchan’s remark about Kolkata curing depression rests precisely on this culture of Adda. While interacting with a Bengali woman auditor from the Comptroller & Auditor General’s office on KBC, he did not utter the word Adda, yet his meaning was unmistakable.
It is no coincidence that Bachchan himself spent seven or eight formative years in Kolkata before entering Bollywood. So did Abhijit Banerjee, Amartya Sen, Amitav Ghosh, and the Oscar-winning Ray. Even global literary giants such as Hermann Hesse, Günter Grass, and Dominique Laperrière found in Calcutta a climate fertile enough to produce their finest works, including Siddhartha.
Calcutta of yesterday and Kolkata of today may appear cacophonous on the surface. Yet beneath that noise lies an aesthetic order, visible only to the intellectually and spiritually attentive. That vision is born in the streets and alleyways, through endless conversation and contradiction.
The beatific dimensions of Adda stand as living testimony to Bachchan’s intuition: that depression finds its remedy not in silence, but in speech; not in isolation, but in fellowship; not in certainty, but in debate. In every nook and corner of Calcutta—then and now—conversation itself becomes a form of healing.
*Vivekanand Jha is an Author, Academician & a Public Intellectual.
