Chandigarh, Feb. 17 -- Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong coined the phrase that power grows from the barrel of a gun and French existentialist writer JeanPaul Sartre corrected it in practice and writing that intellectual power grows in the Coffee House. Closer home in Kolkata, intellectual exchange or adda (chat), as the Bengalis call it, is a way of life. When in most other places animated conversation and meaningful dialogue surrendered first to television and then to the ever-evolving over smart mobile phone, in Kolkata it did not. Interestingly, a decade (or so) ago Peter Trachtenberg captured the spirit of the Bengali adda for The New York Times in an article titled The Chattering Masses. Finally the author asks a local if adda is an addiction and pat comes the reply: "Adda is a profession!" ...