The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (33 page)

All true, she assures me, but Calcutta these days is mainly “functionally creative.”

“ ‘Functionally creative’? What do you mean?”

“Look”—her voice rises above the noise—“nothing in this city works—
nothing.
No two days are the same. What worked yesterday may not work today. So you learn to improvise.”

This is what psychologists call small-
c
creativity. It’s the sort of quotidian creativity that we all possess in varying degrees. Small-
c
creativity might mean jury-rigging a finicky lawn mower rather than buying a new one, or rearranging your living room furniture rather than building an extension.

Small-
c
creativity is important. Not only does it help us get through the day, it also limber us up for big-
C
creativity, in much the same way that bodybuilders progress to heavier and heavier weights. Creativity is like a muscle, one that Calcuttans are, out of necessity, constantly exercising. To
be clear, I’m not suggesting that rearranging your furniture is an accomplishment on a par with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but it does get the creative juices flowing, and who knows where that might lead.

There are no straight lines in Calcutta. Everything is circuitous, even the conversation. The Bengalis, word lovers that they are, have invented one for this sort of nonlinear conversation. It’s called an
adda
, and it played an important role in shaping the Bengal Renaissance.

What is an
adda
exactly? It’s something like the Greek symposium, only without the watered-down wine and flute girls, or anything resembling an agenda. “An agenda would absolutely kill an
adda
,” one person tells me, clearly horrified at the prospect. That’s why professional comedians and compulsive philanthropists are among those barred from an
adda
, for “if it cannot be enjoyable for its own sake then its existence becomes meaningless,” observes the writer Buddhadeva Bose.

An
adda
is a conversation with no point, but it is not—and this is a key distinction—a pointless conversation. An
adda
might sound like a simple bull session. Bengalis assure me it is more than that and proudly point out that the tradition (some version of it anyway) has survived to this day, despite the decline of Calcutta and the rise of social media.

An
adda
is something like a book club, only instead of talking about a book, participants can talk about anything—the train journey they’re about to take, the latest cricket game, politics. Sometimes an
adda
takes place at set times in someone’s house, or one might break out spontaneously at a coffee shop or tea stand. The type of location matters less than the feel of the place. It must be just right. “In the wrong place, the people, too, seem all wrong. And the right note is never struck,” explains one contemporary
adda-
goer.

We’ve seen how conversation plays an important role in any creative milieu—the philosophical musing at the symposia of Athens, the give-and-take at the Florentine workshops, the verbal violence of Scottish flyting—but Calcuttans took the art of conversation to a whole new level and sanctified it with not only a name but an entire mythology.

As my days in Calcutta unfold, my fascination with the
adda
grows exponentially. I read everything I can get my hands on. Reading about
an
adda
, though, is like perusing a cookbook or sex guide. Helpful, yes, but no substitute for actual experience.

I make a few inquiries and, sure enough, find myself invited to an
adda.
I’m excited. Here’s an opportunity to actually travel to that foreign country, the past, rather than read about it.

The
adda
is held at the home of Ruchir Joshi, journalist, novelist, and bon vivant. He’s invited a few of his friends, fellow Calcuttans who, like Ruchir, left the city for a while but boomeranged back. Over
aloo tikka
and rum-and-Cokes, the conversation meanders. We veer from the serious (Indian cinema) to the silly (Indian politics). There is no logical progression. To demonstrate a point about Calcuttan geography, Ruchir deploys saltshakers and other household implements.

Despite the lively conversation, I can’t help but detect a sadness in the air, a feeling that while the city had a good run, its best days lie behind it.

“I was born on the rump end of a great historical freak-out,” says Ruchir. “By the end of the sixties it was over and we didn’t know it.” With golden ages, there is always a lag, and it might take decades for people to realize that the glory days are over.

“It was a cocktail, an alchemy,” adds Swaminathan, a slight man who, from the moment he arrived, has rolled one joint after another. “For one hundred and fifty years, nothing could challenge Calcutta,
nothing
, from Tokyo to Cairo.” His voice trails off, mingling with the streams of white smoke swirling about him like a low-pressure system.

Several rum-and-Cokes later, Ruchir declares, “The city is a great teacher, a cruel teacher.”

We all nod, though I’m not sure exactly what he means.

“What about feeling good?” I ask. “Where does that enter the picture?”

“Feeling good is not a service we provide in Calcutta,” he says sharply. “If you’re looking for the easy path, you’re in the wrong place.”

Places of genius are never easy. The Bengal Renaissance didn’t happen because Calcutta was a nice place to live. It happened because it
wasn’t
a nice place to live. The creative flourishing was, as it always is, a reaction to a challenge.

A few more rum-and-Cokes and I’m beginning to understand the
nonlinear beauty of an
adda
. Topics require no transitions. They arrive unannounced, and sometimes with great ferocity, like the monsoon rains.

“There is a stubbornness to this city,” someone says, apropos of nothing, and that rings true. Great places, like great people, tend to be stubborn, though they prefer to call it persistence.

When I ask, point-blank, how I can unlock the mystery of Calcutta, Ruchir replies, “Everyone enters Calcutta through the back door,” but fails to mention where I might find that door.

An
adda
, I realize, is a great forum for asking questions. Rarely does it yield definitive answers, but as I learned in Athens, it’s the questions that matter.

Finally, Ruchir declares the
adda
over. We’ve exhausted topics of conversation. Plus, we’ve run out of rum and Coke.

As we stand to leave, Swaminathan, barely visible through the cloud of smoke now engulfing him, offers me this parting advice: “Walk. Get up early, at dawn, and just start walking. Don’t take a lot of money, don’t have a destination in mind. Just walk. Don’t stop walking. You might have an epiphany.”

I promise him I will.

A few days later, walking purposelessly, as Swaminathan had suggested, heeding no GPS, and guided only by the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “the great affair is to move,” I find myself unexpectedly enjoying the nonlinear quality of the exercise and of the city.

As I meander, I meet a Canadian priest named Gaston Roberge. He has lived in Calcutta for the past forty years and counted Mother Teresa and Satyajit Ray among his close friends. He recently compiled a list of seventeen things he loves about Calcutta. “O Kolkata,
mon amour
,” he calls it, using the Bengali (and now official) spelling of the city’s name. I chuckle at No. 2 (“You can urinate anywhere as per need”) and No. 12 (“Traffic lights are to be obeyed only if a policeman is standing nearby”), but No. 16 nails the place. “Kolkatans have created a unique human configuration: individualism combined with gregariousness. Each one does what he/she wants while enjoying being in a group.”

In one sentence, he has summed up not only the genius of Calcutta but of all great places. In these places, one is alone together. Sometimes this happens by design. Sometimes by coincidence. The beautiful thing is that it doesn’t really matter.

Today, Calcutta’s greatness is spoken of in the past tense. Yes, as I said, a few embers continue to glow, but the creative fires that burned so brightly have largely been extinguished. Calcutta’s biggest export these days is a persistent and especially melancholic strain of nostalgia. This is the sad fate of most places of genius. They only get one shot at greatness.

Most places, but not all. One city managed to defy the odds and produce a delicious double dip of genius the likes of which the world had not seen before, or since.

SIX

GENIUS IS UNINTENTIONAL: VIENNA PITCH-PERFECT

EVEN BEFORE I COLLECT MY luggage at Vienna’s übermodern, Euro-smooth airport, before I hop on the whisper-quiet train that will magically transport me with nary a bump (lest I spill my espresso) to the heart of this most seamless of cities, I see him. He is in profile, a black silhouette against a stark white background, his considerable nose practically bursting off the serving plates and T-shirts and chocolate bonbons, careening across the centuries and announcing to all who care to listen, and even those who don’t,
Genius coming through. Get out of my way.

A few minutes later, while walking to my hotel, I spot Vienna’s other iconic personage, splayed across a poster, bearded and inscrutable, cigar in hand, silently imploring me to talk about it.

Mozart and Freud. The two faces of Viennese genius. Two men, separated by a century, but who shared a love for their adopted city and who, crucially, were shaped by it in ways neither fully understood.

Vienna’s golden age was longer, and deeper, than any other. It was, in fact, two distinct golden ages. First, in roughly 1800, a musical flourishing
brought us Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and the wunderkind Mozart. Then, a century later, a much broader explosion of genius touched every field imaginable—science, psychology, art, literature, architecture, philosophy, and, once again, music. Freud, with his eclectic interests and confessional couch, epitomized this second Viennese golden age; Mozart, with his laserlike focus and discreet sycophancy, the first. That is where we begin, with the music.

Vienna’s musical flourishing is the story of how enlightened, if sometimes overzealous, leadership can help spark a golden age. It is the story of helicopter parents and arrogant youth colliding. It is the story of how a stimulating environment can spark genius, and also extinguish it. Most of all, it is the story of artist and audience collaborating to produce a work of genius.

Normally, we don’t consider the audience in the genius equation. We assume that they are merely the passive recipients of the gifts that the genius bestows. They are much more than that, though. They are the appreciators of genius, and as art critic Clive Bell said, “The essential characteristic of a highly civilized society is not that it is creative but that it is appreciative.” By that measure, Vienna was the most highly civilized society to grace the planet.

Mozart didn’t compose for an audience but for
audiences.
One audience was the wealthy patrons—nobles, typically, including the emperor himself. Another audience was the city’s finicky music critics. A third was the public at large, middle-class concertgoers or dust-caked street sweepers attending an open-air, and free, performance. Musical Vienna was not a solo performance. It was a symphony, often harmonious, occasionally discordant, never dull. Mozart was no freak of nature. He was part of a milieu, a musical ecosystem so rich and varied it practically guaranteed that, eventually, a genius like him would come along.

Arriving in Vienna in 1781 from sleepy Salzburg, Mozart was ecstatic. He was twenty-five years old and at the top of his game. So was Vienna. His timing could not have been better. A new emperor, Joseph II, was on the throne, and determined not to be outdone by London or Paris in
culture, he was willing to spend cash toward that end. He was more than Vienna’s musical sugar daddy, though. He appreciated music,
got
music. He played the violin himself, practicing an hour each day. He was, in that sense, much like the poet-emperors of old Hangzhou and Lorenzo the Magnificent. He led by example.

The new emperor and the young composer were, in a way, doppelgängers. Both struggled to escape the shadow of a strong, domineering parent and succeed on his own terms. Joseph could not have been more different from his mother, Maria Theresa, a wholly imperious leader, and so anti-Semitic that on those rare occasions she met with Jews, she had a partition installed so she didn’t have to look at them. Joseph, on the other hand, saw himself as a
Volkskaiser
, a people’s emperor. “I am not a sacred relic,” he snapped at a subject who tried to kiss his hand.

Soon after he ascended to the throne, he fired most of the palace staff and stripped his personal office of all ornamentation. He drove through the streets in an inconspicuous green carriage or traveled by foot—something unheard of for an emperor. He often socialized with those several rungs down the social ladder and took an active interest in the nitty-gritty of Viennese affairs. Sometimes he’d rush to the scene of a fire, help extinguish the flames, then chastise the firefighters for not responding more quickly.