More than just a hot drink

What do you do when you are not doing anything? Drinking chai, what else! This is literally the case for many. Breaking for a cup of chai between tasks is considered a fundamental right at workplaces. Warm and comforting, it inspires feeling of relaxations and trust and fosters instant bonds among strangers. Indeed, drinking chai is synonymous with being Indian.

Is chai an addiction or can it best be described as a carefully considered compulsive habit? Whatever the case may be, it works in many amazing ways: if you are sleepy, you need a cup of tea; if you are cold, tea warms you; if you are restless, it will cool you; if you are depressed, it will cheer you up; and, if you are excited, it will calm you. No other beverage offers so much at such a low price. Unsurprisingly, India consumes some 1.2 billion kilograms of tea each year.

The Book of Chai is a celebration of the milky brew that’s an intrinsic part of the life of Indian communities worldwide. Each cup contains within it an interesting bit of history. This is true if you are slurping it at a roadside dhaba in Bhopal, a tiffin room in Chennai or at a café in Dehradun. And rarely do two cups taste alike.

Successful London-based tea entrepreneur Mira Manek whose love for chai led her to set up the Chai by Mira brand takes the reader on an enriching, even therapeutic, journey. In The Book of Chai, she blends 65 delicious tea recipes with personal chai memories to highlight the drink’s integral role in Indian life and culture.

The Chinese were drinking tea for over 2,000 years before the rest of the world woke up to its pleasures. It was only after tea plantation was established in Darjeeling in 1841, that cups of chai became ubiquitous in India. The untiring efforts of numerous people who pluck soft tea buds for further processing is what makes your morning cup reality. And the CTC (Crush, Tea, and Curl) process is what drove the massive growth in consumption that has led to 75 percent of the domestic crop, a little over 800 million kilograms, being consumed within India alone.

Chai is more than just a hot drink. Herbs and spices infuse it with delicious and distinctive flavors. From ginger and cinnamon to cardamon, cloves, lemongrass and nutmeg, any number of spicy chai variants are available on retail shelves. Mira Manek’s range of fragrant chai recipes to be enjoyed through the day include the familiar Ukaro and Kadha, and Saffron Chai Muesli and Pumpkin Chai Latte, among others.

As a student, this reviewer often consumed 17 cups a day. At a conservative estimate, that’s about 28,000 litres of chai in an active lifetime. Friends often wonder if chai flows in my veins. To which I retort with the response favored by the Japanese: “If a man has no chai in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty”. Chai connects the drinker with some of the great things in life. And unlike other beverages, a cup of chai in itself makes for good company. From the first sip to the last, the chai drinker is transported to tea gardens in the hills with their flowing streams, chirping birds, and hovering clouds. 

Most Indians simply cannot live without their cup. From keeping loneliness at bay to invoking freshness, chai does it all. It is an aggregate of many things poured into a cup; the aroma and flavor are just physical manifestations. Flip through The Book of Chai while you sip on a steaming cup of India’s favorite mood enhancer.

The Book of Chai
by Mira Manek
Hachette, New Delhi
Extent: 289, Price: Rs. 899.

First published in The Hindustan Times on June 4, 2024.

Will the Sun ever set on Coca Cola?

Cities across the world are suffering from a severe water crisis as climate change fears turn real; there’s also a huge pushback against the use of sugar with diabetes on the rise. Yet, travel to virtually any place on earth, and one is likely to find a bottle or can of Coca-Cola. How has this carbonated drink become ubiquitous across the water-stressed world, and whose primary constituent is locally sourced water only?

The story of Coca-Cola reflects the entrenched realities of globalization, development and capitalism, and Sara Byala’s Bottled tells it from the perspective of Africa where the sugary drink is available everywhere, when most life-saving medicines are not. “In its profound breadth and depth, Coca-Cola offers an unequalled lens onto modern Africa,” she writes.

Kola nut to Coke

Yet, as Byala points out, “there would be no Coca-Cola without the African kola nut”, and she begins her story with how America got enamored with the west African tree and its seed which has a caffeine-yielding stimulant. “In May 1886, as Europe was scrambling to carve up the African continent, John Pemberton [in Atlanta, America] created the earliest version of a beverage that would soon be called Coca-Cola, a drink whose name and whose origin, came in part, from Africa.”

Coca-Cola, says Byala, narrates its African story as one of “unstopped progress” that began with its first bottling in South Africa in 1928, and is now present in every African nation as the continent’s single largest private employer “with a multiplier effect”.

Byala, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, provides an in-depth assessment of how a global beverage brand adjusted its marketing strategy to the socio-political demands in conquering a continent. While she undertook fieldwork in eight countries, Egypt, Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, Byala guided research assistants to conduct interviews in several nations.

From Cape Town to Cairo — the accompanying illustrations and photographs, including one of a Coca-Cola stall in front of the Sphinx, Egypt tell a thousand words more — the company aligned with everything from education to the anti-apartheid struggle in locating the beverage in the lives of people. “The more I researched and spoke to people, the more the story of Coke appeared as a parable for late capitalism, full of both cause for concern and seeds of optimism,” she says.

Fringe Benefits

By 2020, more than three quarters of a million Africans were being supported by Coca-Cola, not to mention that 10-12 indirect jobs were being created in related industries. It is a familiar narrative on how corporations contribute to solutions while generating problems in the first place.

Coca-Cola’s sustainability initiatives around water, carbon use, and waste recycling have been talked about. The company promotes healthy, youthful, and active living in its marketing campaigns but never in its century-old history has it ever suggested how much of its intake will be enough for a healthy body.

Like elsewhere in the world, Coca-Cola’s century of existence in Africa is not without its fundamental share of contradictory compromises. While increased consumption of the global beverage is not without serious ecological and biological impacts, its missionary endeavor to plough back a small portion of its profit back into social emancipation is anything but greenwashing — justifying capitalism’s logic of insatiable growth against what the ecosystem can sustain.

Bottled is as much a social history of colonization by a beverage company as an expression of self-determination and acceptance of modernity by an unsuspecting mass of people across the continent. Byala highlights how Coca-Cola positioned itself differently in each country, bending to consumer power in generating a distinct narrative focused on its sale. While it does help enhance an understanding of a globalized and integrated world it also raises a critical question: at what cost can the planet and human body endure it?

Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African 
by Sara Byala 
Hurst, London
Extent: 366, Price: £30.

First published in The Hindu on June 2, 2024.