Once, when I was posted in Kolkata, my colleague and best buddy (an Anglo-Indian) invited me to a weekend gathering in her house. I was excited to attend a ‘party’ – an experience completely new for me.
As the evening progressed and the guests settled down, music was put on and suddenly a middle aged couple got up and started dancing. Imagine the shock because being a true blue Bong my idea of a social gathering, or partying for that matter, boiled down to a singular entertainment (call it enterprise) , that is, adda.
Adda is one of those untranslatable words whose dynamics cannot be narrowed down to a single parameter. It’s a dialogic exchange between two or more participants which can continue endlessly ranging from the most trivial to the most intellectually uplifting. For example, it can start with the acute disappointment with the local grocery store to the most happening next door romance or a suspected extra marital fling bordering on the scandalous to a detailed analysis on how Saurabh Ganguly’s cricket captaincy is a notch up than that of Virat Kohli’s to the more esoteric conversation on the deeper tenets of Karl Marx’s dialectic materialism and so on and so forth.
It doesn’t take much for a Bong to zigzag through discussions on varied topics which can, at times, be the cause of heated arguments (personal aspersions not excluded) and even resulting in temporary or permanent relational turbulences. After all, it’s the Portuguese blood which got somewhere coagulated into the local stream centuries back catalysing hot headed, passionate, partisan interactions!**!
Anyway, coming back to socializing, I guess it has different connotations for different social groups and is definitely country and culture specific. I learnt from a podcast that in South Korea for a couple dating means taking part in activities together like painting or reading together. In one of the Kdramas, the hero gifted his lover a set of colouring books and puzzles (supposed to be stress busters) as she was going through a distressful phase in life. No roses, chocolates or diamond rings – not that I am a believer of the tagline “nothing can express subliminal love better than diamonds” yet….
Cut two – the local para (neighbourhood). A boy and girl unnecessarily going round and round the serpentine gullies in a miasma of obnoxious odour rising out of the open drains by the side, with a perpetually dreamy look in their eyes – that’s the ideal , intense, ultimate, romantic courtship of a Baangali (Bong).
At least, that’s what it used to be in my hey days …. Ahem. As I am a self declared dinosaur I really don’t have any idea how millennials courted or the Gen Z initiated a relationship. I presume it would be more direct and ‘lets get to the brass tacks” type since it’s the age of speed. Given the pluralist society of India, I believe, every community and region, must be having their own norms of social exchanges. I don’t know either if adda has been overtaken by hip-hops or salsa with the globally attuned Bong crowd now.
In the North, adda is easily replaceable by dhandha (money making). Long time back North Indians looked up to Bengalis as the quintessential intelligentsia. In sharp contrast , in the 90s, my colleagues considered me as part of a community of losers who did not have adequate business acumen or money making sense.
Here, people seldom have conversations but only sharing of information on long and short term gains in investments, share market, kitties and committees (financial pools with neighbours or acquaintances), regrets on losses incurred in business (dhandha abhi manda hai) and the so called ‘profitable’ jobs on which an (illegal) income (called the upari) other than the salary can be earned. Point to be noted that when dhandha is not manda is never disclosed or talked about. I have all along felt at a loss in company of people where the mainstay of a conversation is the number of gold, platinum and other precious credit cards flaunted by an individual.
Down South, it’s again very subtle. The conservative, nose-up-in-the-air undertones are unmistakable. In between pleasantries, they’d very politely enquire about and form opinion on your socio-economic status – not how loaded you are or how huge your purchasing power is but what positions your forefathers have held in the royal courts or at the Nizam’s , how many qualified engineers and doctors are there in the close and extended family, preferably settled abroad, whether you have visited such and such landmarks in the state or city like the hospital or school which stands on land donated by one of their ancestors etc.
Of course, I write strictly on the basis of my personal experiences and interactions. No generalization here. Coming back to where I began and to cut it short, as dancing does not come naturally to me I’d prefer a slow opening up of meaningful (outside the mercenary) discourse anytime than tapping or clicking heels on the floor. And by the way, that’s purely my drawback. There’s nothing wrong in waltzing through a “knowing each other” evening in case you like it that way.
