In the beginning, before Café Coffee Day, Cafe Barista and their likes there stood Calcutta Coffee House, ''a village in the center of the metropolis, steaming with gossip, curiosity, political intrigue and slander.”

Situated in the heart of Calcutta, the coffee house was commissioned in 1942 by The Indian Coffee Workers' Co-operative Society, but quickly developed on the lines of a student Literaten Kaffeehaus. Satyajit Ray would dream up films here, while many a writer consumed coffee beneath its vaulted arches. Noise, gossips and cup-carrying waiters seethed between the writers and their subjects.

Here, under the high whistling ceiling fans and in the environs of the fading mildew covered brown walls, sat tragic young writers with puff-pastry egos; the air was thick with philosophical rantings as dense as the number on their glasses. More than any other coffeehouse, perhaps, the Calcutta Coffee House exemplified this "Antelle" attitude, a monument to the glory of Calcutta and its uplifting elixir, to caffeine and the rich conversation it spewed.

The coffee house has been resistant to change since its beginning and has slowly trotted along for the almost 70 years of its existence. Albert Hall, as this place was called before the present sobriquet was bestowed by the Central Government, has been a favourite of Rabindranath Tagore and Subhash Chandra Bose and could boast of a legacy of Swadeshi meetings.

Smoke from an entire barrage of cigarettes spirals up to the ceiling as people drink their coffee with an accompanying glass of cold water, reading newspapers while eating samosas or Chicken Afghani (only twenty-three rupees). Elderly turbaned waiters in faded white uniforms drift from table to table.

Everyone knows about Calcutta’s love for talk, and a conversation at the Indian coffee house usually involves some amount of talk about Dostoyevsky, cricket, politics, football, food and always with a footnote about the songs of Tagore.

And though there is a general feeling that the days of intellectual revelry have passed it by for a blander experience, the Calcutta Coffee House has desperately held onto the atmosphere of an era gone by: the dark-brown walls, the stark wooden chairs and tables, white porcelain and steel cutlery, nothing seems to ever have changed.

"All the literary giants come here," says student Aparna Sengupta, pointing at a picture of Tagore hanging on the wall, "It's a special Calcutta place."