Kolkata is a city that survives on conversation. But the question that now hovers over every conversation about the city is, will Kolkata's youth stay in Kolkata long enough to keep the conversation alive?
At the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2026, a panel titled ‘Celebrating the City: Kolkata Stories Then & Now’ did a very Kolkata thing. It stopped trying to define the city and simply sat down for an adda.
Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, a chronicler of Calcutta’s intellectual life, suggested that adda unsettles the logic of modern capitalism. It insists that thinking does not always have to lead somewhere; that time spent together does not need to justify itself.
Anchored by Husna-Tara Prakash, with Anita Kar, Aritra Sarkar, Bachi Karkaria and Shaun Kenworthy on stage, this adda did not try to rescue Calcutta from decline. It spoke of nostalgia, and the understanding of what Kolkata really is.
Journalist and author Bachi Karkaria spoke of growing up in a city that never insisted on cultural purity. It was never neatly Bengali.
A “rainbow collision of qualities,” she called it.
Like the long-running Nahoum’s story — a Jewish bakery, with Muslim bakers, and Hindu customers lining up for cakes during a Christian festival. In Kolkata, this never demanded applause.
What the city gave her, Karkaria said, was time. Time to build friendships. Time to return to them.
But Kolkata’s refusal to hurry remains both its flaw and its beauty. In a conversation with My Kolkata, she was clear that this is not laziness.
“It is a refusal to reduce living to productivity”,she said. But she was equally clear-eyed about the risk. Cities, she warned, do not lose their spirit overnight. Culture alone cannot hold a city together. Some form of involvement, and employment must coexist with the memory.
Anita Kar, who authored Sripantha’s Kolkata, a translation of historian and journalist Nikhil Sarkar’s Bengali book Kolkata, said, to fall in love with the city one has to ignore the noise, the grime.
When she moved to England, translation became her way back. Translation, for her, is an act of care, carrying a city’s stories from Bengali into English without flattening their texture. The challenge, she said, is to ensure nothing vital is lost in translation.
And that is a familiar anxiety in a city that has spent decades watching its people leave.
Shaun Kenworthy arrived in Kolkata without childhood memories to defend.
Perhaps that made his attachment sharper. The UK-born, Kolkata-based chef and author of Curry Chaos Romance spoke about encountering the city first as an outsider, absorbing it without any inherited explanations. What struck him was the spirit of Kolkata. The human kind.
Aritra Sarkar’s intervention was the most self-critical. His book Soulful Cal was born out of that same irritation at the familiar refrain:
‘Ei shohor-e kichhu hobe na’ (nothing will happen in this city) He admitted to having been party to such discussions — addas. It irritated him.
But then came the guilt. And with it, responsibility. The real loss, he realised, was not opportunity but attention.
Kolkata, he argued, reveals itself only to those willing to appreciate the seemingly uneventful.
Like daily routines of the barbers, cobblers, presswallas, yellow taxi drivers.
The conversation inevitably turned to youth. To the fear that Kolkata is becoming a city people love only after they leave.
In a conversation with My Kolkata, Sarkar rejected the idea that movement equals rejection.
Young people continue to arrive, from Bengal’s districts, from the Northeast drawn by something the city still offers. Kolkata is like a magnet to them, he said.
“Opportunity elsewhere is not betrayal to the city”.
The adda did not promise that Gen Z or Gen Alpha would romanticise Kolkata. It lingered instead on what Calcutta was, what Kolkata has become, and that there's hope left.
What it made clear was that romance alone will not keep the city alive. If the young do not re-engage through work, through employment, the nostalgia stands a risk of evaporating.
And then, the adda might halt.