Every town even the smallest is becoming a Cafe Capital of India… it’s a third place for the young and old and the place for some. Between School and Home… Between College and Home … Between Work and Home. For some Between Home and Home.
There isn’t a town or hamlet without cafes today… it’s what pubs were to the UK … and it’s not an India thing it’s happening… everywhere…
All those who can afford expensive coffee or snack have favourite… it’s their cave of solace… a place to prepare for and celebrate triumphs even downturns.
It’s a place to build relationships… deal with breakups. Social relevance where public spaces are throttled it’s common to see dating couples, clandestine affairs even legit couples take time out to meet and proliferate and are safe havens in the heaving humanity and its glare and suffocating glare of societal judgement.
After the British had clubs, the Coffee Board gifted India the first coffee shop culture.. that gave rise to many a revolutionary, intellectual, love affairs and happiness from the 50’s.
Cut to 90s the first Cafe Coffee Day at Brigade Road gave a cup of coffee and free internet for 30 minutes for ₹ 60…. Fantastic air conditioning… clean toilets and it was a beginning of a Cafe Revolution… Barrista, Costa and then the Big one Starbucks and many fallen Trojans too like Gloria Jeans etc.
It’s today a highly fragmented market either every neighborhood offering huge option in cities, towns, district, tehsil and even villages… let alone touristy places and pilgrimage centres which have even greater options.
In my recent travels I have Cafes everywhere… Goa, Kangra, Dharamshala, Una, Amb, YoL, Srinagar, Gulmarg, Sonmarg and all the highways in between.
My Dear friend acclaimed journalist and entrepreneur… took her parents for coffee and cakes in Thrissur and ran up a bill of ₹1500, where a coffee in a restaurant is 20 bucks… in some cases they don’t sound as democratic as they are intended.
I just hope the pricing doesn’t kill the Cafe Culture quite like bars and restaurants for liquor have outpriced themselves.. have encouraged home drinking, car drinking and in some cases byob…
My daughter in her growing years found subterfuge at the nearest Starbucks for her paper writing… thinking… applications… sometimes like a library.. as all the readings are in the laptop…she spent her afternoons and early evenings there .., I often visited her and was called out as her Dad in that space her space..and not my Daughter .., which was so good… she had a consumer identity so young.
The real estate conundrum with prices so high I often wondered how can a cafe make ends meet. We live near GK2 market and own a property in the Galleria Market where the rates are touching the proverbial Khan Market (one of the most expensive pieces of real estate)… I wonder how do they break even.. so every time there is a Cafe that wants to hire I dissuade then and myself despite being offered high rental, that they won’t last long. Which has happened often in the past.
Meeting for a coffee means so many things to so many people now, a gateway to a job, meeting a tenant or a landlord, meeting a long lost friend, weekly round up for work from home, sales meeting for working the field outfits, family breakfast or shopping halt, meeting a lover, a girl, a boy or both.. a LGBTQ safe heaven, for the pet friendly, the creative type, to get hired or fired… to read the ads on the notice board… take a brake from a tiring shift, between shifts, tea and toilet break in the city or on the highway, a pitstop to energise, a waiting room at a hospital, airport, bus station,rail station, for celebration, for mourning to perk one up, the regulars, the visitors, the tippers, the non tippers for reunions, for bikers, for cycling groups, kitty party friends, the mahjong or chess buddies…the life insurance agent, the guy without an office and operates from a cafe…a linguistic teacher, the yoga teacher between classes…
A Coffee Place a Haven for most… Cheap Treat for some a Huge Expense for some… so one finds one’s own a Mani’s Cafe or a Magnolia…
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