The big deal

Kunzum Travel Cafe,as the proprietor,Ajay Jain,41,corrects me,is named after a Himalayan mountain pass. And they don’t charge for their tea,coffee and cookies. The concept,instead,is for guests to “pay what they think the coffee is worth”. Free? “Not exactly,” explains Jain,“We’ve decided not to put a fixed price on it. We’re okay with our clients giving us whatever they feel is appropriate.” Kunzum offers a variety of coffee blends made of the finest quality South Indian beans,the most popular of which is the Malabar Blend. The coffee machine is a French press,or a coffee plunger,a machine far superior to the ones used by coffee chains. It comes served to your table on a wooden tray,with two biscuits. The cafe is cosily done up with comfortable seating,wooden floors and walls crammed with photographs of Jain’s travels across Assam,Ladakh and Nepal (for sale,starting at Rs 2,000). Lonely Planets are stacked in a corner and there’s free Wi-Fi. If people want to hang around all day,they won’t be made to feel unwelcome.

An engineer with an MBA and experience in sports management,Jain is a self proclaimed drifter who’s published some travel books,and Peep Peep Don’t Sleep,a collection of funny road signs and ads in India. He insists he’s not in the hospitality business,rather,he’s into creating a community of people who are travel and photography enthusiasts. Since Jain owns the property,he doesn’t have to worry about rent and can concentrate on his real passion: travel. Still,any enterprise comes with fixed overheads of electricity and water and an opportunity cost: you have to have serious faith in humanity and be exceptionally confident of your coffee to experiment with a free concept in a city like Delhi,notorious for its racketeers and scamsters. (A parking attendant at ITO,one of Delhi’s most crowded areas,once told me how office-goers would zoom off without paying him Rs 10.)

That’s where Jain’s revelations are astounding and,in a Desmond Morris-esque way,make you rethink all your pre-conceived notions about the human species. While he has the occasional guest who pays Rs 5 for 3 cups of coffee,by and large,on an average,a customer leaves the same he would at a Barista: between Rs 75 and Rs 100. Kunzum gets a minimum of 100 customers a day,several of whom use a Mac and plug in their iPods into the cafe’s music system. “We rely entirely on the goodness of people and so far it’s working,” says Jain. Many customers tell him to start serving pizza and sandwiches,but Jain doesn’t want to go that route. So he tells them to buy whatever they want elsewhere,and eat it at Kunzum.

There have been many indirect benefits of Kunzum’s free concept. Advertisers and sponsors have expressed interest,there’s been more traffic to the website (www.kunzum.com/travelcafe) and footfalls are increasing rapidly. In the bestseller Go Givers Sell More authors Bob Burg and John David Mann argue that sales is about giving,and that there doesn’t have to be a contradiction between self-interest and other’s benefit. Mull over it: over free coffee.

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