May 29, 2021, Commentary from Zoom

May 29, 2021, Commentary from Zoom: Today was an important day for some of us. About 52 weeks ago one of my bondhu from Calcutta Boys’ School (CBS) had suggested that, since many were in nearly two and a half months of lockdown in Calcutta and there were varying levels of lockdowns in the rest of the World, we should consider an adda on Zoom. The adda is an invention of Calcutta. It is an absolutely open-hearted conversation between friends about nothing. Many cultures have similar concepts but for people from Calcutta, the lifeblood is the adda. This is witnessed on the front stoops of the city’s houses, in the coffee houses, in family gatherings on Sundays after a sumptuous Sunday lunch of “pathar mangsho (mutton)” and myriad other food to be concluded with mishit doi (sweet yogurt) and if the season is right – aam (mango). Those memories linger in nearly all Calcuttans no matter where life has placed us. Without the adda, we are suffocated, and the best adda is when it is in the Bengali language interspersed with some pukka (proper) English and not the watered-down version of the New World. In the summer of 2020, we all collectively were missing the adda, and the suggestion of the video meet seemed attractive. And it worked. Nearly 52 weeks ago was the first one. I liked it so much, having been deprived of human contact by the distancing in North Carolina, I took up the responsibility of hosting the event on video conferencing every week. And we did not miss a week. Consider that – every Saturday at 9:30 pm in Calcutta, and corresponding times across many time zones, we gather, and we talk. Uninterrupted for nearly a year. Once I joined the adda from a plane, 30,000 feet over Nebraska on a cross-country flight from Los Angeles to Washington. When one considers the return to a post-Covid World, I have a feeling that this will still continue because it offers a moment of peace that we all seek in the company of people we know. Covid made this happen, and even after Covid will become, perhaps an annoyance we learn to live with, I have a sense that we will still meet in this way – because we can – and it brings people together in a way which was always technologically possible, but in the nostalgically cherished “normality” of the pre-Covid World no one ever thought of doing this. Oxymoronically, this s is a gift of Covid. On any Saturday there would be people from Calcutta, Bangalore, Bombay, London, Washington, Winston-Salem, Pittsburgh, Springfield, and Los Angeles. We grew up together and we are getting old together. Again. What would have been atomized individuals who might have just met in passing or in carefully curated parties, usually in the private clubs of Calcutta, has now been supplemented with the comfort of seeing the familiar faces, and doing the familiar arguments (and the occasional quarrels) which gives us what Covid wanted to deprive us of – companionship of people. We morphed, and we worked out a way to find a moment that did not exist in the pre-Covid World but will perhaps become a part of the post-Covid World. It is up to us decide what we carry forward when the masks finally come off, whether we will continue to be in the place that Portnoy cheered in 1982 – “where everybody knows your name.”