A coffee break in Bangalore

The act of sipping coffee has always been a simple act, or so I had thought. Saucers have been around since the middle ages. A saucer has been used to traditionally cool the coffee by pouring it in the saucer, the increased surface area helps the coffee to cool down. For the first time in my life I encountered coffee being served in a steel tumbler placed in a steel bowl (called dabarah) in the city of Bangalore. This curious sight intrigued me, as I particularly tend to harbor a curious feeling of what is called "ethnocentrism", and being easily amazed by practices of the "other". A Bangalorean explained that it serves the same purpose as that of a traditional saucer. Well, that does make sense, but my ethnocentric mind still reasoned that the small surface area of a dabarah isn't at all much helpful, it further aggravates the pains of drinking hot coffee. Steel scalds your fingers, being a better conductor of heat than ceramics. Coffee filled to the brim which again makes it impossible to hold the steel tumbler. Ceramic has been used for ages and more widely around the world to drink tea or coffee, and there's a reason why it's popular- ceramic being a bad conductor of heat takes time for the tea or coffee it holds to cool down. Along with a smaller circumference of the tea cup, and the ceramic, the tea cools down slowly. Although the circumference of the tiny steel tumbler is same as the cup, which should serve the same purpose as the ordinary ceramic cup, however not only does the ceramic cup helps to hold the cup more comfortably, there’s also the handle of the cup which prevents any danger of scalding yourself in the process. Drinking tea or coffee in a tumbler is common in other places in India, in Bengal the roadside tea stalls serve tea in small glass tumblers. Glass again being a bad conductor of heat makes it easier to hold.

After pondering over the usefulness of using ceramic or glass as a material for making tea or coffee vessels, I next ventured upon devising a way to efficiently drink the coffee served in these curious vessels. Holding the hot tumbler was impossible, and I found pouring the coffee in the dabarah too outlandish for me, although pouring it in the bowl wouldn't really make it possible to avoid scalding my fingers. Next I tried to hold the dabarah, along with the coffee tumbler, and began sipping my coffee, still considering the whole exercise curiously weird. Coffee mugs in present day usually tend to be longer, coffee is seen as medium which is to be sipped slowly over long, lazy or leisurely conversations, hence the mug needs to be longer to expand the time taken to consume the coffee held in that mug. Back to the coffee that I was consuming that day in a shop located near an office building, the coffee served in this shop was poured in tiny tumblers. I'm unsure regarding the effects of this tiny dose of caffeine in the long dozy afternoons after lunch, when workers struggle to remain alert. However I guessed while the dosage of caffeine might be minute in these tiny tumblers, an amount of which tends to spill over in the dabarah, or in extremely clumsy hands outside the dabarah as well, these tiny tumblers of coffee aid to keep the capitalistic wheels of our society running, shortening our hours of breaks in a working day. As I neared to finishing my coffee, after being alert and cautious the whole time, as any new method needs to be executed cautiously, my mind drifted elsewhere, as it usually happens while sipping coffee. The coffee spilled splendidly over my shirt. I had accidentally tilted the dabarah more than required, and the tumbler sliding to one side, effectively made my coffee break something to remember for a while. I have since found out that this curious manner of serving coffee is common in the rest of South India as well.

(Originally written in the 1st week of July 2017, as part of a writing assignment, and which ultimately only managed to receive lukewarm reviews- disappointing it's author who anticipated positive reviews.)