Suman Kar spent every year of school and his diploma in engineering, by his own telling, as a backbencher — not the kid teachers expected to build anything. Today, if you stop at a tea shop in Durgapur, there is roughly an 80 percent chance you will get a good cup of tea, and Suman Kar is the reason: he is the founder of Adda Khana, now widely called Durgapur's best tea shop. Over two long conversations with host Barun, he lays out exactly how a diploma engineer who once worked the quality line at Royal Enfield ended up running a roadside stall that grew into a local institution — without ever taking a loan to start it.
The two-part conversation, episode 6 of the Deep Down Show, does not treat Adda Khana as an overnight success story. Suman Kar walks through the job in Chennai that never quite fit, the years at Royal Enfield learning to read an engine by its sound, a Bangalore showroom job cut short by the pandemic, and a father who could not get his son a bank loan but gave him a strip of land behind the house instead. By the time he is warning viewers not to copy him blindly, the caution carries weight, because he has just spent thirty minutes explaining exactly how hard the copying is.
From backbencher to Royal Enfield's test bench
Suman Kar did not follow the usual engineering track. He went through a diploma course instead, admitting that as a student he barely scraped by — "if I hadn't handled it properly, my whole year would have gone," he says of one particularly rough patch with maths and chemistry. His first job, in Chennai, left him dissatisfied; the work culture, he says, didn't suit him. He kept applying elsewhere and eventually landed a job with Royal Enfield, at its Tamil Nadu plant.
At Royal Enfield he worked the engine line and the test bed, where every engine that came off the line got what the industry calls a "history card" — a running record followed line by line. Suman's job included listening to an engine and telling, just from the sound, whether something inside was wrong. He estimates that during his years there, close to five thousand engines passed through his hands. It was also where he picked up Tamil, since his colleagues and, later, customers spoke the language — a skill he says still helps him today, when Tamil-speaking customers walk into Adda Khana and he can talk to them in their own language.
A showroom job in Bangalore, and a lockdown that changed the plan
After around two years at Royal Enfield, Suman moved into a vehicle showroom, working in sales in Bangalore. It paid less, but he says it taught him things engineering never had — how a business actually runs, how to handle a demanding customer, how to keep accounts. That period ended when the first COVID lockdown hit. Sitting at home in Bangalore with nothing to do, he says the wasted time started to weigh on him: if he was going to prepare for anything — a government job, a fresh direction — he needed a fixed plan, not an open-ended wait.
He decided to come home to Durgapur. There was no dramatic business plan waiting for him — just a family that could not raise the collateral a bank wanted for a loan. "We are a lower-middle-class family," he says plainly. His father told him: if you want to do something, do it — and used what the family had to get a small structure built behind their house, right on the highway. That plot, with a highway location and some open space around it, became Adda Khana's first home.
Two brothers, and a shop that grew one pot at a time
Adda Khana did not start as a tea brand. It started small — a modest roadside stall near a spot where trucks pulled over, the kind of place that sells snacks and tea to drivers passing through. Suman began making tea two litres at a time. As demand grew, so did the batches — from two litres to larger and larger pots — and the shop itself kept expanding, bit by bit, alongside it. It took roughly two years, he says, for the business to find its current shape.
He did not build it alone. Adda Khana is run by two brothers: Suman, whom he calls the public "face" of the business, and Sumit Kar, his brother and co-founder. Asked directly whether the business would exist without Sumit, Suman doesn't hesitate: without him, he says, "I'd be empty." Beyond the two brothers, the shop runs with a small permanent staff, some of whom, he says, have been with him long enough that the place now runs like a close-knit team rather than a rotating shift of hired hands.
Money was tight from the start, and Suman is emphatic that Adda Khana grew without institutional help. "I'm running a business myself, I know what a business needs," he says at one point — using the English phrase "taste your blood, taste your sweat" to describe what building it actually took. For more than its first two years, he says, the business was purely bootstrapped: no bank loan, no outside investment, every rupee earned put straight back into the shop. It was only more recently, once the business was standing on its feet, that he took on some loan financing to keep expanding.
Chairs, lights, and the neighbours
Growth on a residential stretch of highway did not come without friction. Suman describes a string of small battles with neighbours as the shop expanded: objections when he extended the structure, objections when he put up new lighting, objections when he added chairs and tables for customers to sit and linger. Some of it, he suspects, was less about noise or crowding and more about a shop drawing a crowd that a neighbour simply didn't like — he says he doesn't understand why his shop draws these objections when all he's selling is tea, nothing harmful.
Safety was a real concern too, given the highway location — vehicles turning in and out near the shop meant genuine risk if things weren't managed carefully. His response was to invest in transparency and control: eight CCTV cameras across the property, partly for security, partly so he can see exactly how staff are treating customers and handling the space even when he isn't looking directly. He has also gone through the paperwork most small operators skip — a trademarked logo, a trade licence, and every tax filed since day one — specifically, he says, so that when someone eventually comes to check, as they periodically do, there is nothing to find.
No compromise on the tea itself
Whatever else changed, Suman insists the product itself never got a shortcut. "I never compromise on quality," he says, describing periodic experiments with new flavours — a cardamom (elaichi) tea among them. One recent addition came directly from listening to customers: he noticed a growing number of people over 40 asking for tea without sugar, often citing diabetes or blood pressure, so a sugar-free option went on the menu.
He is equally direct about what the shop has become for the town. Adda Khana's name says as much as its tea does — Suman describes customers settling in for a stretch of time, hours spent talking over cups of tea, "adda" in the fullest sense. That, as much as the tea, is the product Adda Khana sells.
Durgapur's closed factories, and the "entrepreneurship wave"
In the second half of the conversation, Suman widens the lens from his own shop to the town around it. He points to big industrial names in Durgapur — MAMC among them — that once employed large numbers of people and have since shut down. What survives, he says, increasingly hires on short, one- or two-year contracts: a company gets two years of labour at a lower cost, and workers who could have stayed longer are let go once the term ends. He contrasts this with his own years at Royal Enfield in Tamil Nadu, where he describes multiple tiers of jobs and, by his account, a workforce that was earning more consistently across the board.
That backdrop, he argues, is part of why so many young people in Durgapur are turning toward small businesses — an "entrepreneurship wave," as he and Barun both call it — with tea shops as one of the most visible examples, Adda Khana's own visibility included. But Suman is careful not to take credit he thinks the moment deserves more than he does, and he's openly wary of the wave itself.
Should you open a tea business? Suman Kar's answer
Asked, in effect, whether everyone should follow his path, Suman is blunt: no. He argues a single street doesn't need five tea shops copying each other's format; one or two well-run shops serve an area better than many undifferentiated ones, and a flood of copies dilutes the very thing that made any one of them work. By his own rough estimate, 90 to 95 percent of people who jump into a business the way tea shops are being opened now end up unable to keep it running — not because starting is hard, but because sustaining it, day after day, is.
His advice circles back to something more personal than a market observation:
"কাউকে ফলো কোরো না, নিজে এমন কিছু করো যাতে অন্য কেউ তোমাকে ফলো করে।"
Suman Kar
Don't follow anyone — do something yourself so that others end up following you. It's a line that also appears in the show's own description of the episode, and Suman repeats the same idea in the second part almost word for word: don't chase what someone else built; build a "history" of your own.
On criticism, and writing your own history
Suman has heard plenty of unsolicited commentary along the way — relatives and acquaintances who, he says, would ask why he studied engineering only to end up running a tea stall, or tell him directly that he'd wasted his education. His filter, as he describes it, is simple: check anything he hears against his own sense of right and wrong first. If a comment holds up, he takes it in and acts on it; if it doesn't, he lets it go. Praise gets the same treatment — he says he appreciates and values constructive comments, and ignores the rest.
He closes the second part of the conversation with a direct message to viewers, echoing the same theme that opens the description of the second episode — "kono kaaj chhoto noi, kore jao, egiye jao," no work is small, just keep doing it, keep moving forward — and adds a line of his own about setbacks: if something blocks you, don't be discouraged by it — keep going.
Who is Suman Kar
Suman Kar is a diploma-qualified engineer from Durgapur and the founder of Adda Khana, now widely regarded as the town's best tea shop. He worked on the engine test line at Royal Enfield's Tamil Nadu plant before moving into vehicle sales at a Bangalore showroom, then returned to Durgapur during the first COVID lockdown to start the business with his father's support. He runs Adda Khana with his brother, Sumit Kar, on a plot of land behind their family home on the highway.
Why this conversation matters
Adda Khana's story is less about tea than about the mechanics most business conversations skip: what it actually takes to get a loan when you have no collateral, what it costs in neighbourhood goodwill to expand a small shop, and what it means to keep growing without outside money propping you up. Suman Kar's account sits well alongside Debaditya Chaudhury's very different but structurally similar climb from a 300-square-foot restaurant in the Chowman episode, and it speaks directly to the question the show's own Bengalis-and-business episode asks head-on.
What makes this conversation worth the full two parts is Suman Kar's refusal to sell his own success as a template. He built something real out of a highway stall and a family with no spare collateral — and then spent the second half of the conversation telling viewers, plainly, not to assume the same thing will work for them just because it worked for him.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Suman Kar, the founder of Adda Khana?
Suman Kar is a diploma engineer from Durgapur who worked at Royal Enfield and later at a vehicle showroom in Bangalore before starting Adda Khana, now widely regarded as Durgapur's best tea shop. He describes himself as a backbencher throughout school and college who never expected to end up running a tea business.
How did Adda Khana start?
During the first COVID lockdown, Suman Kar left his showroom job in Bangalore and returned home. His father could not get him a bank loan, so he gave Suman space behind their house on the highway to build a small shop. It began as a modest stall serving tea to passing truck drivers and grew from there.
Did Suman Kar take a loan to start Adda Khana?
No. He says the business ran fully bootstrapped for more than its first two years, funded only by reinvesting what customers paid, with no bank loan and no outside investment. He says he only took on some loan financing later, once the business was established and growing.
Who runs Adda Khana with Suman Kar?
Adda Khana is run by two brothers, Suman and Sumit Kar. Suman calls himself the public face of the business but says that without Sumit, the shop would be 'empty' — crediting his brother as essential to how it runs day to day.
What makes Adda Khana's tea different?
Suman Kar says he never compromises on quality and keeps experimenting with flavours, including a cardamom (elaichi) tea. Noticing customers over 40 asking for tea without sugar, often citing diabetes or blood pressure, he added a sugar-free option to the menu.
Does Suman Kar think everyone should open a tea shop?
No. He is cautious about the wave of new tea shops opening in Durgapur after Adda Khana's success, arguing a locality is better served by one or two well-run shops than many copies. By his own estimate, 90 to 95 percent of people who rush into a business this way end up unable to keep it running.
What does Suman Kar say about closed factories in Durgapur?
He points to large industrial units like MAMC that once employed thousands in Durgapur and have since shut down, and says many surviving companies now hire only on short, one- or two-year contracts. He contrasts this with his time at Royal Enfield in Tamil Nadu, where he says the industrial workforce had more stable, tiered employment.
