Coffee, art and culture
By Kuldip Dhiman

SATIRIST Karl Kraus once made a sardonic statement: "The talented are so crowded around a coffee-house table that they block each other’s development". In Chandigarh, it is the other way round. The talented hardly have a place to meet, interact, debate, or even fight it out. India’s most modern city has museums, galleries, and restaurants, and an impressive number of internationally acclaimed artists, writers, poets, thinkers, but no art environment. If you are an artist and want to go to a place where you can stimulate your creative faculties, you have no option but to go to one of the restaurants or parks.A restaurant might be clean, and might serve excellent food, but it might not have the atmosphere. Or if you are an art lover and want to spend the evening listening to a poetry recital, or join in a debate with in intellectual, all you can do is attend formal seminars. You would envy the coffee-house culture of Paris, Berlin or Vienna where artists, writers, poets, thinkers spend hours and hours hanging about with other creative people.

Le Cafe Noir at the Alliance Francaise, Chandigarh, Sector 36, is here to fill the vacuum with a deadly mixture of coffee, art and culture. And why not, after all Chandigarh was designed by a French architect. But Le Cafe Noir is different.It is not an art gallery or an exhibition hall. It is a place where artists and art lovers can go to have something to eat or drink. A place where they can play chess, carrom or just relax. Monsieur Gilles Guey, the Director of the Alliance Francaise, explains the alternative Le Cafe Noir offers: "We have about 1600 students and members who had been complaining that they didn’t have a place to sit, to interact, to converse. There is an auditorium that we weren’t using very much, so we decided to use it as a cafe when it was not in use for any literary function. Although you have a number of coffee-houses in Chandigarh, but unlike them Le Cafe Noir is a literary cafe. The idea of a literary cafe is to have an informal atmosphere, where the speakers are amidst you and you can interact with them, and we have seen how effective this method is. Even if a famous person comes to our cafe, he or she will have to come down to the level of others and interact with the students and members. That is how it is done in the literary cafes of France. Or you can borrow magazines and books from our library and read them at Le Cafe Noir. We even have a notice board where you can display your poems, or hang your paintings or photographs on the walls. Right now the walls of the cafe are like an empty canvas, but soon they will get filled up with signatures, paintings, photographs, and souvenirs."

Most people complain that Chandigarh is modern, beautiful, clean, but it does not have cultural activities that they see in Calcutta, New Delhi, or Bombay. It is a city of babus and traders who have no concern for art and literature. Monsieur Guey says, "Even in France cafe houses were set up only in the eighteenth century by an Italian businessman. At that time you had wine bars there, so he wanted to start a different place where artists could come and interact with each other. The cafe houses were not very successful in the beginning, but picked up later on. And now we are very keen on cafes. I think in India you meet a lot in parties, but in France you meet in cafes. Talking about Chandigarh, I think people are aware of art, and I have met a few art collectors, too. It is picking up, as you can see now there are a lot of art galleries. Little by little these art galleries will begin to specialise, and awareness will spread. It is just a matter of building up this environment. And we at the Alliance Francaise are doing out best to encourage talent. As you know besides Le Cafe Noir, we have a regular art gallery where we have held a number of exhibitions. Just recently we had an exhibition and lecture by Shiv Singh. When I arrived five years ago, it was difficult to sell even one piece of art per exhibition, but we manage to sell up to ten pieces now. So it is not as bad as it seems."

Since Le Cafe Noir is not a commercial cafe, it is open to its students and members only. You can become a member by paying a nominal annual fee. Besides Le Cafe Noir, you can also make use of the Alliance Francaise library that has an excellent collection of books, magazines, newspapers, and video cassettes. You will also get a special invitation to all the art exhibitions, literary sessions, film shows, music shows, competitions and other activities. "The Alliance Francaise will soon have projection machines," says Monsieur Guey, "so that you can see films on the large screen followed by discussions. Recently we organised a French Film Festival that was attended by 7000 persons."

Those who despair about the lack of art activity in Chandigarh should remember that even cultural centres like Paris, Berlin, and Vienna were at one time as culturally sedate as Chandigarh is now. Take the case of Vienna, its leading cafes such as Cafe Sperl and Cafe Central became cultural landmarks only after they were frequented by the leading intellectual giants of the age. At the Cafe Central, the exiled Leon Trotsky played chess with Lenin. Later Freud, Ezra Pound, and Theodore Herzl turned it into a hotbed of intellectual dissidence. As it is always men who make institutions and not the other way round, it is up to the intelligentsia and literati of Chandigarh to usher in cultural awareness here. And Le Cafe Noir may well be the starting point.