Organic Farmer takes class on Linkedin about Tea Culture

India is a predominantly Tea drinking country. India loves Tea. Chai is the bloodline of working class India

Coffee is a western export. Baba Budan smuggled coffee beans from Arabia into India during 1600s and sowed them in the hills of Chikmaglur in Karnataka.

Coffee grows relatively less than Tea, so is more expensive.

We have heard enough and more interesting stories such as the above. As though to negate all these theories, an IT employee turned Organic Farmer took a lesson on tea culture on Linkedin recently.

Madhu Chandan is the Founder of Organic Mandya, a chain of retail stores that sell organic produce especially from the district of Mandya in Karnataka.

“What we call “chai” today is not some age-old Indian tradition — it’s a colonial habit we picked up less than 100 years ago. Here’s what really happened”, said Madhu.

In the 1800s, the British started growing tea in India to compete with China. But Indians weren’t interested in drinking it. So they marketed it hard:
– Free tea at railway stations
– Chai breaks for factory workers
– Street stalls with sugar-loaded milk tea

By the 1930s, they developed CTC (Crush-Tear-Curl) — a method to turn low-grade leaves into tea dust that brews fast and strong.

Not for taste.
Not for health.
But for speed, addiction, and profits.

And the milk? Our native cows gave golden A2 milk — rich, seasonal, sacred. But it wasn’t enough to serve a billion cups of chai.

So came Operation Flood — The White Revolution.

Exotic foreign cows.
High-yield.
Low-quality.
Milk turned to a bland, white liquid — processed, dead.

This wasn’t progress. It was programmed dependency. Today, we proudly drink a concoction of:
– Tea waste
– Refined sugar
– Over processed milk

And call it “culture. No. This is not our culture. This is a colonial hangover — one that made us forget our own roots, signs off Madhu.

Editor’s Note

This revelation from the Organic Farmer is a wake-up call to those who are so obsessed with Tea, with most of Northern, Central and Eastern India relying on the beverage as a staple.

Coffee continues to remain elusive and expensive, thereby making it affordable only for a few. Enter Instant Coffee.

Instant Coffee was an outcome of World War 2, when most Europeans couldn’t afford ground coffee at homes or at cafes. A new invention, with robusta coffee beans roasted and powdered emerged to serve the war-torn countries.

Slowly, the European economies recovered and their makers moved the instant coffee varieties to developing countries like India.