Make Calcutta Relevant Again

Nayana Gangooly, Textile and Travel Enthusiast, Entrepreneur and Owner of Nayana's Homestay, sits down on Make Calcutta Relevant Again to talk about what it really means to belong to a city that refuses to let go of its stories, its silk, and its ghosts. She explains: ◼ Why being a Calcuttan is "something so incredible" because it lets you be whoever you are ◼ The eerie true story behind the historic duel between Warren Hastings and Philip Francis ◼ Why Bengal's oral storytelling and "ghost story" tradition is fading in the age of smartphones ◼ How her homestay keeps the region's textile heritage alive by working directly with artisans and craftspeople ◼ How travel, textiles and hospitality became one entrepreneurial journey for her

Entrepreneur, restaurateur, and founding member of rock band Lakkhichhara, Debaditya Chaudhury is the man behind iconic restaurant chains Chowman and Oudh 1590. In Episode 65 with Meghdut Roy Chaudhury, he reflects on building a national food and beverage business while staying deeply rooted in Kolkata. Debaditya shares why he believes in promoting people from within rather than hiring managers from outside, why discipline is the one skill he considers his biggest strength, and why his definition of success is far removed from the conventional idea of it. He also speaks about balancing business with music, and the deep connection he continues to share with Kolkata.

Some businesses begin with a mission statement. This one began with a five-rupee note, handed over by an old lady. In this episode of ‪@makecalcuttarelevantagain‬, Meghdut Roy Chowdhury sits down with Anant Nevatia, President and Trustee of the Rural Health Care Foundation, to trace how a businessman ended up spending decades bringing surgeries, sight and dignity to Bengal's villages. Why he refuses to call it charity, what a woman at one of his camps said that stayed with him, and why he believes Bengal's next big leap will not come from its cities at all. Anant talks about why he never quite calls his work charity, building his foundation to run more like a sustainable business than an act of goodwill. The conversation turns on that one moment at his camp, a woman who refused to be treated as someone asking for a favour. It is a small exchange that says more about his philosophy than any mission statement could. Despite years of ground level work, Anant stays clear eyed and hopeful about what Bengal's villages actually need, and where he believes the region's next big leap will come from.

Some conversations start as Adda and end up feeling like a manifesto. In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut sits down with Saikat Chaudhuri, Faculty Director at Stanford University, to ask why Bengal is so good at ideas yet so uneasy about turning them into enterprise. He traces it back to the Adda itself, hours of brilliant conversation the West would have monetized long ago. Saikat talks about running a business engineering double degree program and mentoring entrepreneurs through a startup incubator, all built on one belief: technology should solve real problems, from surgical care in villages to reimagining education. The conversation sharpens around purpose versus profit. Saikat argues that Bengal's purpose over profit mindset can tip into self defeat, pointing to Bengal Chemical and Boroline as proof that doing good and doing well were never opposites. It's exploitation, not profit, that deserves the bad name. Despite the critique, he calls himself an eternal optimist about Bengal, seeing crisis as the very moment industries like healthcare, education and fintech get disrupted, and insisting Bengal's real strength was always its intellectual capital, not just its technology.

Two musicians who arrive from very different directions, yet meet in the same restless, questioning place. Some songs do not just play. They stop you where you stand and make you feel like they are singing about the exact street you grew up on. That is the feeling this episode chases, and it brings together two musicians who arrive at it from very different directions, yet meet in the same restless, questioning place. In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut sits down with Subhadeep Guha and Deepmoy Das, two of the most distinctive voices in Bengal's independent music scene, for a conversation that moves between the tender and the brutally honest. Subhadeep is a musician and music director whose band Hooligaanism turned private grief into something a whole state could sing. He speaks about how it grew from a theatrical piece written in the shadow of the pandemic and the loss of his mother, and how the song Bodlaabe Gotipoth, written in the mountain air of Gangtok, carried that sorrow outward until it became a movement rather than a memory. Deepmoy comes to the same table from the deep well of tradition. A graded vocalist of All India Radio, trained first in Rabindra Sangeet and then in the Baul and Fakiri folk traditions under some of Bengal's finest, he has spent years carrying that inheritance into the present through his folk fusion band Rong Tulika and his long-running Kobita Connection project, where song and poetry meet. He talks about living several artistic lives at once, moving between folk, fusion and the spoken word, and why that switching between forms feels less like a juggling act and more like breathing. Out of these two very different journeys comes one of the sharpest debates of the episode. Is everyone born an artist, or is the word something you earn through years of practice, failure and devotion? Both men are wary of the term, both prefer to call themselves practitioners and musicians, and the way they defend that position tells you how seriously each of them takes the craft. Together they open up a side of Bengal that outsiders rarely understand, the way Durga Puja has quietly become one of the few places on earth where public art and independent musicians receive real financial support, funding large-scale live work and creative freedom the commercial world almost never allows. They are equally honest about the cost of it all, the exhaustion, the punishing review cycles, the sheer difficulty of sustaining a life in music, and about the thing that makes it worth it, the stranger who writes to say your song finally let them sleep after years of insomnia. Underneath everything sits a shared politics, rooted in the traditions of alternative and third theatre, the belief that art exists to give a voice to the voiceless. The conversation ends where the best ones do, on the question of what a better world would actually look like. Not a utopia, they agree, but something far more grounded, a world where dignity, education and basic facilities are simply available to everyone. It is a fitting close to an episode about two artists who make music not to escape reality, but to face it more honestly.

There is a nightclub in Mexico City, invitation only, and it is named after a Bengali revolutionary. There is a nightclub in Mexico City so exclusive you cannot get in without an invitation, where some of the biggest DJs in the world come to play, and it is named after a Bengali. His name was MN Roy, and before the club, before the legend, he was a revolutionary from Bengal who went on to found the Communist Party of Mexico, moved through the city's most elite circles, and lived quietly on the upper floor of the very building that now carries his name. When the founders of Paperclip stumbled into that club on a trip to watch football and eat their way through a five-hour taco marathon, they found a story hiding in plain sight. Finding stories like that is the whole reason Paperclip exists.

When Paroma Ganguly left the law in 2015, nobody in her world could quite understand it. She was a fourth generation lawyer, trained under some of the finest legal minds of her generation, holding down a top law firm salary and the kind of security a Bengali family prizes above almost everything. And she walked away from all of it to sit with embroiderers and tailors and figure out how to tell the story of a city on half a metre of fabric. In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut sits down with a woman who built one of the most distinctive homegrown labels in the city without ever training as a designer, and who insists she is not a designer at all but a storyteller and a textile artist by her own right. They talk about how it started with the humble blouse, that half stitched afterthought of an outfit, and how she turned it into a canvas for palash and aparajita and joba, the everyday Bengali flowers nobody bothered to celebrate, and for the Howrah Bridge skyline that her customers now wear as a piece of the city itself. Her one piece of advice is simple. Love yourself, love what you make, and be prepared to wait, because you cannot make biryani in five minutes, and you should not trust anyone who promises you that you can.

In this episode, Meghdut Roy Chowdhury sits down with Indranil Das to talk about the one layer of every company nobody protects, middle management, the bridge between the executives and the team, and why he believes AI and technology are going to hit that layer hardest. They talk about staying grounded when success makes it easy not to be. They talk about his two sons, one in Sweden and one in Canada, and the conversation every Bengali parent abroad eventually has about whether their children will ever come home. And then he makes a commitment on camera. He is going to take ten to twelve young leaders in Calcutta, people fresh out of university or just starting their careers, and mentor them personally. The first cohort will be completely free. Leadership training, accommodation for outstation candidates, and food, all covered. A Leadership Academy for the city, built by someone who was mentored himself when it mattered most, and never forgot it. If you are early in your career in Calcutta, or you know someone who is, this episode is worth your time.

The very first thing he asked Princeton Club for was not money or a stage or a sound system. He asked them to drop the dress code. In 2012, Nishit Arora walked into Princeton Club with an idea for a weekly night of original music. If independent music was going to happen properly in this city, he told them, then shorts and chappals had to be allowed through the door. That one small negotiation tells you almost everything about how he has worked in the fourteen years since. In this episode, Meghdut catches up with an old friend and collaborator to talk about everything that followed. They also talk about TopCat, which the two of them built with their own hands. There was no architect, no interior designer and no furniture consultant. They flew to Foshan in China, picked pieces out themselves, and assembled the room with help from the same people who would eventually play in it. Miti came in and tuned the sound system once, and after that they refused to let anyone touch it again. If you were in any of those rooms, this is your history. If you were not, this is how it actually happened. #MakeCalcuttaRelevantAgain

In this episode of Make Calcutta Relevant Again, Meghdut is joined by Debottam for a conversation that travels as widely as the man himself does. It moves from a childhood spent following his tea-taster father through the gardens of Assam and the south to boarding school years in England. The conversation turns, as the best ones do, towards what he wants to give back. He speaks about Matri Bhavan, the Ramakrishna Sarada Mission maternity hospital he volunteers with, where the poorest patients receive exactly the same standard of care as anyone else, and where he wants not money so much as more people who simply know it exists. He speaks about opening up his own remarkable network to mentor a hundred young people from the city, regardless of their field, and about building a fellowship for the one or two who prove they truly want it.