coffee house

Tagore stood fast on the narrow causeway, and did not betray his vision of the difficult truth. He condemned romantic overattachment to the past, what he called the tying of India to the past 'like a sacrificial goat tethered to a post,' and he accused men who displayed it – they seemed to him reactionary – of not knowing what true political freedom was, pointing out that it is from English thinkers and English books that the very notion of political liberty was derived. But against cosmopolitanism he maintained that the English stood on their own feet, and so must Indians. In 1917 he once more denounced the danger of 'leaving everything to the unalterable will of the Master,' be he brahmin or Englishman
Isaiah Berlin

Kanchan didn’t want to talk, but I had better luck at Coffee House, almost as well known as Sonagachi. Chandidas Kumar has been sitting in Kolkata’s revered café almost every evening for the past 42 years. Not much has changed. The walls look like they haven’t been cleaned since Rabindranath Tagore wrote literature here. The uniforms of the waiters, once imperial British Raj white, are as stained and tattered as the streets outside. And the coffee itself? Absolutely, unbearably awful.

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