Chai, Coffee, Starbucks

When I was a kid, I used to think that the food at a 5-star hotel would be great. Ah, the ignorance of youth. Today, I see my 11 yo daughter has the same misconception – she thinks coffee served at Starbucks is good. At that age, we’re used to assuming that the best things cost more. And that they come from the West…

 

When the Pune raised Laxman Narasimhan became the new CEO of Starbucks, unsurprisingly, filter coffee jokes like this circulated in India:


Juxtaposing food and potty in a sentence is something that comes naturally to kids and their fathers. Like this Amazon Prime serial, Mind the Malhotras, where the kid announces to his parents that the pasta tastes like potty (Only a kid can come across a pasta that tastes bad). While his mom is taken aback, his dad asks him, “How do you know what potty tastes like? When did you taste it?”


I put the same skillset to use as we were walking in HSR Layout. I pointed to a roadside tea stall to my daughter and putting in all the scorn I could muster, asked, “That chai only costs ₹10, and yet it’s so much better than that piss they serve in Starbucks. How can you possibly like anything at Starbucks?”


She gave me a withering, you-know-nothing stare, and replied, “Maybe it tastes like piss to you”. If her English was any better, she could have told me that one man's meat is another man's poison. But that’s too much to ask, so I guess I’ll just have to be happy that she seems to be understanding that tastes are subjective. Unfortunately for us, her tastes are all very expensive… 

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