Form in a Tea Cup

For 25-year-old Delhi-based photographer Ankit Goel,a chai tapri is his most interesting muse. His photo blog,www.itshodgepodge.com,captures colourful images that define cities. There are pictures from the Thar desert that show kids sipping tea and of a cosmopolitan crowd holding white cups at The Indian Coffee House,Kolkata. The subjects of another blog entry are tapri wallahs in Delhi. “I don’t drink tea,” says Goel,adding,“But I love visiting tea stalls and cafes because of the uninhibited conversations there. It’s like a vast cultural pool that I love to dive in.”

While Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s proposal to declare tea as the official drink has a storm brewing around it,the beverage is surrounded by a creative simmering. Melbourne-based designer Sian Pascale’s latest design is an interesting innovation based on the kulhad chai. She sipped tea from a kulhad for the first time when she visited India last year. “The experience of drinking tea from an earthen cup and tossing it without any guilt offered a pleasure that is hard to quantify,” says the designer who has come up with the ‘pi ke phut’ cups. Her design idea was to embed the cups with seeds of carrot,rocket salad,parsley and so on. Once they have been used,they need to be discarded to fulfill their potential. “I saw how these traditional cups were being replaced with plastic cups,” says Pascale. The new kulhad not only retains its earlier utility,but also provides a beautiful design-based solution.

Stores across Delhi have the tapri chai motif on a range of products,from glasses to fridge magnets. “Our product designing students have been using several such local motifs to present a cultural stand. In fact,these products have quite a big market abroad,” says Dhimant Panchal,director,MIT Institute of Design.