Adda is the Bengali word for long conversation among friends. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his essay “Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity,” describes it as “the practice of friends getting together for long, informal and unrigorous conversations.”
In 1983 Manna Dey released the song “Coffee Houser Sei Addata,” about the adda at the Coffee House on College Street in Kolkata. Gauriprasanna Mazumdar wrote the words and Suparna Kanti Ghosh the music. The song remembers seven friends who met there. In a 2006 BBC Bangla poll, listeners ranked it fourth among the greatest Bengali songs.