Less Coffee

Excerpts from The Hindu Sunday Magazine...

"....at this very same place there used to be an old India Coffee House, renovated to make way for an ultra cool chill-out place for youngsters like myself. It would be a lie to say that I dont miss that coffee house - a dingy place with ceiling like a dome; the cheap wooden tables coloured to give an impression of mahogany; waiters in long pagadis; the always-present group of oldies who looked like communist poets or war
veterans or editors of forgotten newspapaers; the glasses and the occasional plates of egg pakodas. I thought the oldies owned the place , but i realise they were there because that was the only place that had not grown younger as they grew older. The India Coffee House had grown old with them...Now a cafe stands in its place. I hang out there, but it remind me of the coffee house and its surprisingly affordable delicacies...Not that this change isn't good, but I want to know what happened to that group of oldies, those waiters,that manager and those tables..."

The coffee house at Kolkata’s College Street was the place for intense intoxication, but achieved without the aid of liquor, remembers eminent Bengali writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen.

A visitor during the 1960s, though not a regular, to that now almost mythical cradle of intellectual discourse, Ms. Sen recollects how the “intoxication of creativity, intellectual excitement and free exchange of ideas” energised the place.

A cauldron of creative energy, the Coffee House was the ultimate pilgrimage for the aspiring writer, the budding poet, the young painters, playwrights and filmmakers or the radical in politics. “It was a kind of lounge where new ideas would be generated and exchanged, where young, creative, thinking people would congregate,” Sen said.

Amid the twirling haze of cigarette smoke, editors of little magazines would prod wannabe writers to submit their articles, while intricate cinematic aesthetics would be laid bare in discussions where Satyajit Ray or Mrinal Sen would hold forth.

Notwithstanding the heated political debates during the turbulent Naxalite movement, the general air was one of friendly camaraderie.

Dipak Majumdar might break out into a full-throated rendition of a Rabindra Sangeet, while writers scribbled furiously on their sheets or enthusiastic painters sketched. Interestingly, there were not too many women who frequented the place in the mid-1960s, Sen recollects."