Amit and Yazad want to make the Bombay Bloggers meet a monthly event. I thought it would be a great idea to have the meet at various Coffee Day locations all over Bombay. If we make it a monthly event, they’ll probably give us a discount. I also thought of a theme song that can be the Bombay Bloggers’ anthem. It starts:
Incidentally, the Ethiopian Qahwah that I had incited in me a desire to learn more about Coffee Day. A little bit of googling found me here. I was utterly horrified to find that Coffee Day is an Indian company that was not killed off by liberalisation. It just shows what a long way we libertarians have to go before we achieve that objective. In fact, I found that Coffee Day had actually benefited from liberalisation. I found this damning paragraph in that page.
With a rich coffee growing tradition since 1875 behind it coupled with the opportunity that arose with the deregulation of the coffee board in the early nineties, Coffee Day began exporting coffee to the connoisseurs across USA, Europe & Japan. In the calendar year 2000, Coffee Day exported more than 27000 tonnes of coffee valued at US$ 60 m to these countries and, for the second time in its short career of 7 years retained the position as the largest coffee exporter of India.
“Deregulation of the coffee board in the early nineties”… That’s something I didn’t know about. But Google knew and it told me this:
However, until recently coffee produced by India was not particularly good coffee. Like many other growing countries, India went for coffee quantity rather than quality in the middle years of the twentieth century. Particularly in the latter half of the century, tons of Indian coffee, bulked and anonymous, went to the Soviet Union in barter exchange for manufactured and other goods. However, beginning in 1992 India began a phased deregulation of the coffee industry, allowing producers to market their own coffee directly to buyers by small lot, and changing the Coffee Board of India from a regulating agency to a promotional one.
So that is what you couldn’t do before 1992. Producers couldn’t market coffee directly to buyers by small lot. They had to pool it and go through the coffee board. Now they can sell directly and as a result, India can actually export good coffee to the world. And I could have Ethiopian Qahwah yesterday.
All said and done, I thought the Qahwah was overarted and no better than an ordinary cappucino.
I like the Kenyan better.
I remember, the “uncle” who lived in our apartment complex in India, was some kinda official in the coffee board. And even as a child, I knew both him and his board were corrupt as hell – for his son took to smoking pot in India in 9th standard.
Bad reasoning then.But I was young;).
But he faced no problems paying those guys off. Correct me if am wrong….isn’t smoking pot in my opinion is still a rarity in India,espeially at such young age.
that was really enlightening ravi…. somehow the thought of having a qahwah is much warmer than having a cappucino at CCD neverthless I enjoy it and somehow the analogy is going to work on my brain….so the next time I have coffee at CCD it will be with a qahwah feel:)