According to a recent newspaper report, a team of researchers at Glasgow University has found a link between coffee and the human intellect. The exhaustive report states that coffee-lovers are generally extra-intelligent and that have sharper mental faculties. In other words, coffee and intelligence are dovetailed.
One can see this bond in Kolkata’s famed coffeehouses on College Street, although their popularity is declining. The coffeehouses of London, Milan, Cairo and Vienna are still frequented by artists and intellectuals, who discuss a gamut of recondite subjects over numerous cups of piping hot coffee.
Che Guevara would sit in a dilapidated coffeehouse in Bolivia to chalk out his revolutionary plans. The turbulent 1960s witnessed Calcutta’s intellectuals frequenting coffeehouses. Their intellectual regurgitation used to be as hot as the coffee served. Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and a young Aparna Sen were regular visitors to the coffeehouses on College Street.
The coffeehouses in Chennai started losing their mojo and mystique by the early-1960s. Ironically, it was Madras that gave coffeehouse culture to the rest of India, including Calcutta. Indeed, the eastern metropolis imbued its coffeehouse romanticism from Madras. Today, however, you hardly get to see old coffeehouses in Chennai. There used to be one very old coffeehouse near Spencer Plaza, but it’s not there any longer.
So many affairs of the heart took place in coffeehouses. It was a nostalgic era, when in Calcutta if you didn’t go to a coffeehouse you were considered an intellectually deficient person. The Bengali poet Jibananando Das wrote a series of poems, eulogising the aroma of coffee, particularly the Calcutta brand coffee. One of his female characters had coffee-coloured tresses. Coffee was indeed his muse. It is said that the painter Claude Monet would go to a coffeehouse on the road leading to the Sorbonne in Paris and paint his landscapes there. The redoubtable Edward W. Said was so enamoured of coffeehouses in Cairo that he would spend eight to ten hours at a stretch, sipping close to 60-70 cups of black coffee. He would call it ‘an intellectual’s elixir’.
In 1996, I had the privilege to be present in an informal discussion with Professsor Said of Columbia University, Egyptian Nobel laureate (1984) Naguib Moufiz and the father of Semiotics Umberto Eco of Italy, at a coffeehouse near Al-Azhar University in Cairo. The group sat down there at five in the evening and left with the morning azaan! During the nearly 12-hour sitting at a 24X7 coffeehouse, literature, poetry, religion, god, women, her enigmatic beauty and what not were discussed over numerous cups of black coffee and cigarettes.
The Spanish poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda would sit in his favourite coffeehouse near Madrid university and write love verses. Lore has it that once he was served coffee by a dusky Hispanic waitress who was just 19. Neruda was floored by her simple but stunning beauty and observed that, ‘Beauty, when unadorned, is adorned the most.’ While leaving, he told her that her complexion enhanced the taste and aroma of the coffee. When she blushed, he called her ‘a coffeehouse beauty’, and extemporaneously immortalised her in a sonnet he titled ‘Coffeehouse Beauty’!
Pakistani Urdu poet Ahmad Faraz, much loved in India, would go to a coffeehouse near Hira Mandi in Lahore and furtively meet his beloved. When she left him for a man much wealthier and more resourceful than him (Faraz), he wrote a poignant nazm, Tumhein koi aur mil gaya... By the way, she was an unnamed courtesan from Hira Mandi, a locality with a dubious reputation, but very popular among Urdu poets and connoisseurs of feminine beauty.
But that aura and aroma are all gone now, at least in India. Whenever I visit Cairo, Milan, Paris, Ankara and London, I unfailingly go to a coffeehouse to inhale that aroma and recreate nostalgic memories. Alas, Calcutta’s coffeehouses wear a deserted look today and one wistfully remembers Manna Dey’s immortal song, Coffehouser shei aadda ta aaj aar nei (there’s no infectious bonhomie of a coffeehouse any longer). Yes, that soul-gladdening coffeehouse culture has gone forever. Many of today’s ‘intellectuals’ require something else to stimulate their grey cells.
sumitmaclean@hotmail.com
