চণ্ডীমণ্ডপ /Chondimondop

Imagine ducking into a smoke-hazed College Street coffeehouse circa 1950: economists arguing with poets, physicists sketching equations on napkins, someone humming a new Rabindrasangeet refrain. That crackle of adda—equal parts erudition and mischief—was Calcutta’s secret power source. Chondimondop exists to bottle that current for the twenty-first century.

Chondimondop is the first Bangla podcast (2019) with one stubborn mission: to archive and amplify the city’s cultural and scholarly DNA before it slips into footnotes. After all, this is the place where J. C. Bose quietly sparked the wireless age—a eureka moment on par with Sam Altman’s AI boom—and where Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray vowed to train worldclass scientists to make his motherland proud, then watched protégés like S. N. Bose and Meghnad Saha stride the same tram-clattering streets. All while the chorus of “Vande Mataram” rumbled through bazaars, shaking off an empire.

Remember, this is the metropolis that—despite a long colonial yoke—linked to six Nobel Prizes directly or indirectly and an Academy Award. We started by interviewing the grey-haired legends who still haunt the quadrangles of Calcutta University (The first western university in ASIA, 1857), salvaging stories of midnight lab breakthroughs, rehearsal-room epiphanies, and tea-stall revolutions. Soon the mic wandered outward—from partition memories to quantum materials, like all true Bangali adda does—because Calcutta’s folklore is urban, unruly, and forever mutating.

Think of us as an audio National Geographic: we don’t chase postcard vistas; we chart the invisible rivers where cinema, science, music, and radical politics merge. Every episode is part oral-history archive for urban folklores, part living adda, served in Bangla and English so the next generation can tune in without a translation lag. No other Indian initiative is mapping a city’s intellectual afterglow with this granularity or gusto—and certainly none with Chondimondop’s taste for playful rigor.

If you believe a civilization’s soul is stored in its stories, pull up a chair. Chondimondop is the vault, the bonfire, and the open microphone (heterodoxy is our soul like the original word suggested)—waiting for your voice before the echoes fade.