Bombay to Burgh

I complain about Nescafe ruling the roost here in India. But a far greater ill doth lurk.

Café Coffee Day is an India-based chain of coffeeshops.  Its Vile Parle location is a landmark that Jeevan and I use when I meet her near her office.  We’ve been to CCD once, but to a different location.  I found the drinks OK, about the same quality I’d expect at a Sheetz back home.  They’d be popular in Pittsburgh if only because the sugar content is off the charts.
The peculiar thing about CCD and the other coffeeshops I’ve seen in India is that they aim to emulate chain coffee shops in the US, which themselves are aping the independently owned coffeehouses and coffeeshops where regulars congregated for more than just coffee, of course.  India had nothing like one of these western-style establishments, or even a neighborhood diner in the sense that Americans would recognize.  The closest analogy to an independently owned corner coffeeshop might be the roadside tea stall, usually open-air and not conducive to the kind of relaxation one might indulge in a western coffeeshop.  Again, I’m talking the locally owned, neighborhood shop with a loyal customer base.  Your Kiva Han or Beehive - not Starbucks or Caribou.
So these Café Coffee Days, Costas and Baristas are here in Mumbai, as disembodied phantoms of a sort; imperfect, mediated carbon copies of places and social phenomena that India had never known.  CCD publishes a magazine that celebrates the new coffee culture.  It includes profiles of actual CCD baristas, interviews with up-and-coming musicians, and other sundry trivia mostly touting its own product line.  The zeal with which it strives to identify coffee as India’s new elixir of hipsterdom is unsettling.  The big sell here is the image of coffee drinkers as somehow infinitely cooler and more cosmopolitan than the bhayyias slinging chai on the corners.  The tagline on all of CCD’s restaurant signs reads “A Lot can Happen over Coffee.”  With one of these joints in just about every Mumbai neighborhood – packed most of the time during business hours - it appears that a lot can happen under a relentless branding campaign, too. 
Sometimes it feels like metropolitan India is in such a tightly coiled state of cultural cringe that it will seize hold of any bit of ephemera from the west, no matter how tacky or throwaway.  I wish that instead, more would realize, celebrate and develop the richness of culture that is already here.