Culture5 min read
Coffee houses and the art of conversation
Wherever coffee has travelled, conversation has followed. In India, the coffee house became a place where students argued, writers met and a city talked to itself, often over a single cup that lasted all afternoon.
A drink made for talking
Coffee has always been a social drink. It keeps you alert, it is cheap enough to order twice, and it gives you a reason to sit somewhere that is not home and not work. Long before anyone had a word for it, coffee houses were doing the quiet job of bringing strangers into the same room and letting them talk.
India Coffee House
In India, the best known of these rooms is the India Coffee House. The first opened in Bombay in 1936, run by the body that would become the Coffee Board, as a way to encourage Indians to drink more of the coffee grown in the country's own hills. More branches followed in other cities, with their turbaned waiters, high ceilings and unhurried pace.
In the 1950s, when the Board decided to wind down its coffee houses, the workers who ran them did not let them close. With the support of the communist leader A. K. Gopalan, they organised themselves into cooperatives and took the coffee houses over. The Indian Coffee House chain that survives today is still run by those workers' cooperatives, and its branches remain places where people come to sit, read the paper and talk.
Bengaluru's coffee tables
Bengaluru has its own long love affair with coffee. Its Indian Coffee House on MG Road was a beloved meeting place for generations; when that building closed in 2009, the coffee house reopened on Church Street, and its regulars followed. Alongside it grew the city's darshinis, quick self service eateries where a strong filter coffee costs little and a conversation can happen standing at a counter.
The habit of a by two coffee, one coffee shared between two friends in two cups, says a great deal about the city. It is a small, generous ritual, and it is never really about the coffee. You can read more about it in filter coffee, the South Indian way.
Why the café table works
- It is neutral ground: nobody is the host, so everybody is welcome.
- It is unhurried: one cup buys you time to think and talk.
- It is close to home: you can drop in without a plan.
- It mixes people: students, families, writers and neighbours share the same room.
That is why music, art and ideas have so often found a home in cafés. A song sounds different when it is played a few feet away. A painting on a café wall gets looked at slowly, over a second cup. A conversation that starts with the weather can end somewhere neither person expected.
A good café table is a small public square, set for two.
At Annara, we hope to make room for exactly this: art, music and ideas, gathered around a love of food and coffee. The gatherings we are planning, and how to bring your own, are on our Culture page.
