“Adda” and the Idea of Deep Hanging Out
Since I grew up in West Bengal (India), adda was a term in my lingo that I had inherited without understanding what it meant — we just did ‘adda’ with friends for hours at a stretch. There was no expectation of an outcome, and the topics of discussion could range from football to politics; from art to literature; from movies to gossip; or just the general state of the world. All that was required was a place, good old friends and some tea (and cigarettes, depending on your age group). An adda was often loud, everyone spoke over one another and it could lead to animated arguments but never any form of animosity. In Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, he argues for the importance of dialogue and tolerance in Indian culture and politics — a sort of adda in our everyday lives!
I remember that many an adda during my teenage years started with Mohan Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting’s performance on the football field. Then it would wander into the latest movies or the front-page topic in The Telegraph newspaper. Often it was just about the new girl in the colony, or the subjects discussed in the upcoming tuition. Engineering college (in early 90’s) was a four-year adda, thanks to the absence of mobile phones and laptops. The topics were mostly around events on the college campus. We would all have easily got a master’s degree in adda, had there been one. After I moved to Bengaluru, the idea of adda was strictly limited to weekends at Coffee House on MG Road, with my college friends.
The coffee house has a history with adda, with the one on College Street in Kolkata being the most famous. Its adda culture has even been immortalized in the cult song by the late Indian singer Manna Dey, “Coffee Houser shei adda ta aj ar nei” (“our adda at Coffee House is no more”). Although the origins of the word are unknown, this beloved ritual is thought to go back to colonial times. During my recent visit to Bengaluru, I wondered whether the idea of adda was still relevant. In a virtual world, where every conversation is short and online, where making eye contact and having long informal conversations is a thing of the past, and debate is a forgotten art, can the adda survive?
Searching for an English term that would be an equivalent of the adda, I considered ‘deep hanging out’, a phrase coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in 1998 to describe the anthropological research method of immersing oneself in a cultural, group or social experience on an informal level. I recently read Deep Hanging Out by Malcolm Margolin who has spent decades wandering around the native communities in California, talking to people, collecting their stories, and creating lasting friendships. Many argue that ‘hanging out’ or spending time with a group of people is one of the best ways to get real stories about the everyday lives of a culture or group. However, since this is a process adopted by an ‘outsider’ who engages in scientific research to ‘study’ a community, it doesn’t reflect the nature of the adda. I then considered the term ‘Meetups’, where a group of people who share a particular interest meet regularly and have often connected via a social networking site. But this too falls shy of capturing the essence of an adda.
An adda cannot be planned; neither should it have an agenda. It should almost always emerge organically. Some of my most memorable moments have been addas and I can hardly explain why. The only necessary conditions were that we never run short of time, and that the discussion be intellectually stimulating. I for one believe that while adda is a uniquely Bengali way of life and is deeply enmeshed in the Bengali psyche we all have experienced it at some points in our life. My fear is that our changing lifestyle might kill it. In our fast-paced world, with the intrusion of mobile phones and social media, we have lost the art of deep conversations for the sake of conversations with people choosing to take offense at minor issues. In Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation, Prof Cohen says, “our society abounds in bad conversation, in part because it makes for entertaining content on the internet and television. People would rather regurgitate predetermined positions, than wrestle with ambiguity.”
There is something about authentic conversations that change our minds and sustain our souls. Great conversations are improvised and cannot be repeated, because the context matters (people, place, time etc) as much as the content. I have felt this in my classroom, often with my friends and sometimes with complete strangers. If we forget that a good conversation (whether in person or online) is about discovering ideas, sharing stories, offering our vulnerabilities and imperfections without being judgmental, the idea of adda may well become a relic.
