Monday, June 18, 2012

The Coffee Shop Culture

I am the generation of Doordarshan and Chitrahaar that evolved into DD Metro and MTV and then embraced cable television wholeheartedly... When I was in school, it was phone numbers that were exchanged, emails weren't all that common and computers were the luxury of a few ( ahemmm, I'm one of the few who did have a desktop at home that had Lotus on it. I also practised my fledgling DOS commands on it and felt thrilled when the machine responded to my commands with the 'right' answers that I had been taught to expect. Dad soon brought back MS office software from the Gulf for us and soon enough, I felt much like a computer geek, ready to conquer the world ahead of my peers.)

 By the time I was doing my post-grad, the in-thing was to share email ids, re-draft resumes with our email contacts added to our address and phone numbers. Any incoming mail into the inbox made us felt wanted, cherished and remembered. Mails would be checked every alternate day and the sense of immediacy we felt then was something to be cherished. Today, my mails are delivered to my phone, moments after the sender dispatched them. And today, I marvel over how people still do send postcards and letters to keep the craft of writing intact. In fact, I can't remember writing anything longer than a few words on a cheque in months if not years. I digress as usual..So getting back,  Greeting cards got replaced by FREE e-cards...Clever messages could be sent for free and the roaring business that Archies cards had at a relatively huge shop near our college kind of took a massive hit to its business.

Till then, going to an ice-cream parlour was the idea of spending time or treating friends. In Kochi, there was the Caravan ice cream parlour - the first one to serve sophisticated ice-creams and sundaes. It was a treat to receive permission from my mom to go there with classmates for someone's treat. It meant being an adult, taking a bus from where I stayed, getting down at the stop nearing Caravan and walking with my head held high and money that Amma had given me earlier in the morning, jiggling in my purse. Asking for the bill and then taking money out of the purse is a rite to adulthood. Much as I hate to have to go through that ritual now that I am a 'fully-matured' adult, while growing up - being allowed to behave like adults held so much thrill. Having the bus conductor, the waiter treat you the way you have seen them treat your parents makes you feel like you have finally arrived on the social scene..

McDonalds was our dream treat while in college and I'd often pamper the kid in me by ordering the Happy Meal. I must say I had a fancy collection of Happy Meal soft-toys and other collectibles. I couldn't be bothered to feel embarrassed about standing in line behind a bunch of kids, scrambling for those very toys that the twenty year old me was eyeing. I don't think the concept of stepping into a coffee shop for coffee existed in my lexicon till I began working.

I was talking about visiting coffee-shops with a friend, when she told about how her mom refused to have a seventy-bucks coffee at the newly opened Barista near her house in Delhi, more than a decade ago. Her brother had just received his first appointment letter as a new graduate and taking his mom to the swank new Coffee Shop was his way of declaring he had arrived and how. But a horror-stricken middle class mom refusing to touch the scaldingly priced coffee would have been a personal nightmare.

While growing up, the Indian Coffee House and its other local versions were our ideas of coffee shops. The liveried waiters bringing us cutlets and coffee in chipped cups and saucers was a great idea of eating out. It was a treat reserved for my birthdays. By the time Baristas and Cafe Coffee Days arrived on the scene, we had learnt that coffee-shopping was a mark of sophistication. The ability to differentiate between an espresso, cappucino and latte was a declaration that you are worldly and a force to be reckoned with among your peer group.

However, the truth is, most of us knew the cheapest priced burgers on the McDonald's menu and on the Barista boards. The idea was to be able to talk about having a McDonald meal or a Barista coffee. It didn't really matter that you had the most expensive one.In fact, by the time Costa Coffee made its presence felt in India, hanging out in coffee-shops had become a rite of passage for school and college-going kids. The bakeries of Kochi now wear a tired, shabby look. On every other corner, there is either a coffee shop or an ice-cream parlour. Most offer free wi-fi and the luxury of whiling away time without being asked to vacate like from your nearest busy Udupi hotel. Unlike the Udupis, where the number of customers served translated to profits, coffee-shop chains made money from frequented patronage and as hangout joints.

Today, on a Monday morning, I'm seated in a cozy Mocha, waiting to catch up with a friend for lunch even as I get some work done in the three hours before I meet her. The fact that there is no wi-fi currently available at this coffeeshop is a downer, but I'm armed with my own internet dongle. We cannot afford to be disconnected from the cyber-world for long. So we make our own provisions for wi-fi now.
Someone gets me a beautifully brewed cup of chai along with some bun-muska. As I munch on breakfast and compile my to-do list for the day, I realise ek post toh banta hai. After all, life as we have known it is changing fast. One chronicle of the lost times and the new life we are forging is necessary. However, I am one to embrace change. There is little that is not good and lots that can be bettered. So here is to Coffee Shop Culture and working out of them and not being bound to stuffy, cribby offices... :)




Have a happy week my bloggies ( shortened version of blog buddies ;)

13 comments:

  1. Gosh I think you are going to get most of your bloggies really really nostalgic..the first time Amma let me go out with my friends and I paid money, I felt like a rockstar..but honestly, (please dont laugh) even now when I take out money from my purse when I pay for my food/coffee, I feel as if I am a grown up...you know the thrill..yep, I still get it...because most times its only with RD that I go, and usually he is the one who pays (What, everything is equal in a marriage ;) ) The few times he doesnt have his card or something,I take out my debit card and I sign it and then I feel so proud :)

    I like the idea of a coffee shop you know, where you can sit like for ever...I should do it one day...take a break from work, home, R, RD, go to a coffee shop and just chill :)

    and it should be illegal to post such pictures just before lunch *Drool*

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    1. I can imagine that so well, R!! :) That sense of being an individual in your own right is a wonderful feeling. Oh by the way, you must must go and sit and read a book at a CCD or Barista some day soon. Go during the time RD and R are taking a nap or so, and just find yourself a quiet nook, order the cheapest coffee just so that you can stake rightful claim to the spot and just plonk yourself down there..it is a great experience! And I look forward to you blogging about it.

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  2. Gosh, this made me so nostalgic!!

    I didn't go to McD a lot as a child. Being from Ahmedabad, I used to frequent the various restaurants that served great food all over the city at quite reasonable prices, with friends from college and then from work.

    I started visiting coffee shops only after I got married, 3 years back. I don't really hang out in coffee shops and work, but I love the laid-back atmosphere of these shops, though I do find the coffees way too overpriced. I love the casual atmosphere of these cafes, and lazing around with the OH, talking about nothing in particular.

    My mom too refuses to have a coffee for Rs. 75, when it could just as easily be had at a Shanti Sagar for Rs. 15 or so. I sometimes give myself that luxury of an over-priced cuppa, sometimes I don't.

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    1. Galnxtdoor, I have just recently begun working out of coffeeshops - more need based than desire-based, actually. When you are travelling and don't have the comfort of your beanbag and laptop table, you begin by trying to make the best of the available resources and then you realise it is quite a pleasurable way to work..:)

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  3. Your posts have become addictive! Just one request, that let me not appear for another eye test, Deepthy:)Lovely writing!

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    1. Rahul, terribly terribly sorry!! Appears to have been unwanted HTML making their way into the text...Didn't initially understand your eye-test line, so I went back to the post and realised the white highlighting. Thanks to you, the code error was found and righted!! :) I wouldn't want to lose a bloggy to an eye-test brought on by my posts, do I now? :)

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    2. Dear blogger,
      My name is Tatiana and I work in a publish company in Spain. I am writing you on behalf of a client who would like to appear in your blog by means of an advertorial. Your task would be to write and publish a post in exchange for an economic reward.
      If interested, please write me back and I will tell you more about the project:tamin@ibooster.es

      Best regards,
      Taty

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    3. Thanks Deepthy, for being so kind:)See, you already have rewards rolling in from an offer from a publishing house:) :)

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    4. Haha, indeed, looks like that now, doesn't it? ;)

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  4. Some people are blessed :)Wish I could work from a similar setting too..
    My love affair with coffee joints started with Indian coffee house at Nagpur where we would gather armed with daily and cryptic crosswords,have endless cups of beverages and chill.Such visits continue (though rare) but sadly, minus the cryptic and the girl-gang.I love all of them-CCD,Barista,Bru world..good for writing as you rightly said.

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    1. The reasons you mention are precisely the reasons why hanging out in coffee shops are nostalgia-provoking..:) We enjoy different things at different points of our lives but a well-brewed cup of coffee never goes amiss!! :)

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  5. Jisha Kishore Kumar20 June 2012 at 21:35

    Wow Deepthy...such a beautiful post. I went on a nostalgia trip...:) Was busy shifting to a new apartment and setting my new home...and all the while was missing your posts...Just now got the net connected and there! what a treat I got from you! Thank you!

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    1. House shifting can be tiring and depressing sometimes. Hope that isn't the case with you and the new apartment is sunny, happy and makes your little ones happy too...And yippie yaay for getting the net connection up too...:) Cheers to reading the next post over a nice warm cup of coffee!

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