The taste of dried leaves boiled in water with milk squirted from a cow.

It is remarkable how very closely Indian life is tied to a single cup of chai. Take for example the happily married Mr. and Mrs. Kapoor. Had Mrs. Kapoor’s (née Iyer) mother not yelled at their cook for adding chilli powder in the morning tea, the cook would never have gossiped maliciously to Mrs. Mehta about “that poor Iyer girl’s ugly wart that almost but not quite obscures her ugly nose.” Mrs. Mehta would never have been paid a surprise visit to the Iyer household, to discover to her delight that there was finally a suitable girl that would agree to marry her good-for-nothing son. Nor would she have survived that nasty bout of mono that was hiding in the finer crevices of her pharynx had she not drunk the chilli-laced tea she was offered at their house. In fact it is widely believed that chai is single-handedly responsible for most or all of the alliances that lead to Indians’ genetic tendency towards early onset diabetes and premature balding.

Chai compounds our burgeoning population and stops Darwinian natural selection in its tracks. It also literally holds the global economy together. This was particularly well illustrated one rainy Monsoon day when Rajkumar, a semi-successful salesperson at a midsized paper company, missed his afternoon cup of chai. Ram the chai-walla, who conducted business at the margin, was forced to close shop and subsequently became a callcenter employee for Verizon Wireless named Mark. Rajkumar, short on insulin and caffeine, fell asleep at his desk and missed an important international shipment to Fanny May. The next day the bottom fell out of the stock market.

Being so important to civilization and such, it’s no small wonder that we choose to celebrate all that is good about culture, art, unity and peace in both the east and the west with spicy Indian snacks and a good hot cuppa. As you slowly sip this modest drink of epic significance, take a moment to reflect on the Iyers, the Kapoors, the Rajkumars, and the Rams of the world and you will realize how truly gifted we are to have chai.

The Beauty of a Slumdog

Slumdog Millionare is not a happy movie. The plot, when taken in its entirety, is of course the "feel good" formula of decades: the poorest of the poor born into the cruel world of poverty, violence and exploitation, against all odds, emerges a winner. And yet, barring the last five minutes, the film hit a little too close to home. It shoved aside the glitter of the Bollywood elite and slashed through the thick, comfortable layer of middle-class Monsoon weddings to reveal the very worst conditions of urban humanity: the forgotten India.
To American audiences the movie will represent the triumph of the human spirit. And perhaps to this end, Slumdogís many Oscar nominations will prove fruitful. For one far removed from the reality that the movie portrays - Salim's opportunism and his final act of sacrifice, Jamal's victory and his stolen romance with Latika - elicits a strong feeling of pride. Like the characters in a vividly real western, the audience roots for the spunky underdog. But for one such as myself, an Indian firmly ensconced in middle-class comfort and blinkered with the deliberate ignorance of la vie en rose, the ugly truth brings a sickening tug of guilt to the pit of the stomach. This is the India we read about, talk about, and yet, the India we have forsaken. These are the very evils we write off as irreparable as we slowly sip a glass of Kingfisher's best.
When I watched Slumdog Millionaire, I was horrified. Horrified at my own blindness. Horrified that up until this point, all I had seen was a hazy unpleasantness in the distance that I chose to ignore for material pleasures. But as I watched, I also felt my heart swell and soar with a feeling greater than happiness. And this is what places Slumdog above the myriad Indian art films about the very same thing. It is what will probably win Danny Boyle his Oscar and separate the west's view of India from their view of, say, Darfur. It teaches us that the world is not as our mothers told us as they put us to sleep, but that the moments of pure, untainted beauty that can be snatched from its forbidding depths are better than any fairytale sung to us in secure warmth of our beds.