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Café Mehfil was launched in March 2021, during my tenure as Student Body President at Parsons Paris, as an informal space for conversation outside classroom during COVID-induced limited physical mobility. Sociopolitical issues were a subject of many students’ work and conversation owing to the Black Lives Matter and almost 70% of the student body was international at the time. It was by students, for students, where students helped each other learn and grow.
The concept originated from two institutions crossing borders, with legacies as places of discourse and free-thinking to foster evolution- artistic, spiritual, or academic. The Mehfil: An intimate gathering originating in South Asia, to have an exchange of ideas through poetry and music. The Café: Synonymous with intellectuals and creatives, the likes of Picasso, Hemingway and Sartre were inspired by Café conversations. During the French revolution, this was a space for political discourse.
The Café sessions ran each Saturday with a different prompt and set of students attending (with sign up and content suggestions being done through open-source sheets sent to students). They evolved organically from some sessions having guest students from other schools coming on to contribute, some sessions having professors coming on as guests, and from the second session onwards, the Café was also published as a podcast out of students’ want to be able to catch up later and archive the conversations we were having.