Adda

"To be asked to write a foreword purely out of friendship is to be granted a rare and generous freedom. While the professional critic may squint at the work's brilliance, and the acolyte is often overcome by its aura, the friend approaches the work unburdened by the need to praise or blame. The spirit of friendship lives in the shadows cast by raised banners and gleaming standards, and in the midst of the cut and thrust of argumentation, friendship seeks out the unconditional voice of conversation. For conversation, as you might hear it among the Chatterjees and the Banterjees at a Culcutta adda, chooses to follow the improvisational over the instrumental. Wandering away from the "gravitational pull of any explicit purpose," the conversation transforms what is contingent, turning what comes up in the course of conversation into the sufficient grounds of a common, collaborative dialogue of interests and affiliations..."

-Homi K Bhabha in a forward to Chakrabarty's Habitations of Modernity