Smell the COFFEE

For new-age cafés, it's big business. Unlike the dying coffee houses of yore, these swanky joints are a different cup of coffee

Sumiran Preet Kaur Delhi

The story of the coffee homes reflects the ever-changing socio-economic dynamics of India.
Ram Shastri, a journalist, has been coming to the Indian Coffee House at Mohan Singh Place in Delhi for the past 30 years. From the open terrace of this café in Connaught Place (CP), he has seen Delhi's skyline change. New, fancy restaurants have come up and swanky cars are all over. Another café regular says, "Earlier, I used to catch the first shuttle tempo (phutphatia) from my office at Shastri Bhawan to come here." He still comes here every evening.

Here in the café, time stands still - torn seats, the muggy lobby, familiar faces. A turbanned waiter in dull white uniform serves the coffee. He, too, seems a relic of the past. The only change, a minor one, is in the price of the coffee: from 75 paisa about 30 years ago, it has climbed to Rs 10.
Shastri and others have grown old with the coffee house. But that is threatened to be disrupted now. Anytime this year, the café could close down following a court ruling. To stall that, the café regulars, most of them above 50, decided to form the Coffee Consumers' Forum.

Thinking man's haunt
The history of this café can be traced back to 1957. A decade after Independence, retrenched Class IV employees of the Coffee Board started the café. It is run by The Indian Coffee Workers' Cooperative Society (a workers' union) which was founded during the price-rise resistance movement in Delhi. They had decided to run the coffee house on a no-profit-no-loss-basis. It originally existed in the Theatre Communication building, where today's Palika Bazaar has come up.

Continuing with tradition, the café still hosts dialogues and reading sessions with writers, poets and artists. It was common to hear people get up and recite poems. Nobody was a stranger here. Anybody could join any group or sit solitary nursing a cup of coffee. Civil society and human rights groups would hold meetings. This was a place to fix future appointments, plan a spontaneous resistance, write a letter, conceive a poster/hoarding/wall paper, exchange/read a book, meet friends and foes.

Gossip was a ritual. If you had your ear to the ground, you could catch news breaking in those radio days. One day in the mid-1970s, somebody leaked that emergency was about to be clamped down. This was bad news. The emergency saw fundamental rights crushed. The original coffee house at CP, where there was unbridled freedom of expression, was bulldozed in 1976 by Sanjay Gandhi. After emergency, it got a new lease of life. The NDMC helped it shift to its current address at Mohan Singh Place, behind Regal cinema, next to Rivoli, in CP.
Shastri recalls: "It wasn't just about coffee. It was a home away from home. We sat till the lights were switched off," he tells Hardnews.

Winds of change
The 1990s saw liberalisation of the Indian economy. Private players brought in snazzier options. Around 1995, year-long renovation work by the NDMC added to the woes of the coffee house. Its sales dipped rapidly. To balance the losses, the management pumped in funds at its other branches at Kamala Nagar and Badarpur in Delhi. The café also has branches in Shimla, Chandigarh, Dharamsala, Ludhiana, Jaipur and Allahabad. The Shimla coffee house at the Mall, for instance, is always jam-packed.