REVIEWS

Love Labour Lost
— Shoonya Kumar

How a Pottie Kadai reveals more about the identity of a city than large grand plans

Love – (in)the blue box

Tea is a widely popular comfort drink in India. It is usually accompanied by some local Indian savories and snacks.  Reveled widely across the nation, it binds people, over candid conversations on politics, movies, food etcetera. Served in an earthenware cup (kullarhs)[1] or a glass or paper cup, the style, taste, recipe, quantity, quality, and presentation varies from region to region. Unarguably a drink of preference, it is also a gesture of courtesy and an expression of warm welcome resonating with the cultural ethos of the country.  

Chennai (13.0827° N, 80.2707° E), a coastal capital city and one of the largest metropolises in South India, home to the finest shore temples across the continent, is no exception to this tea culture. Tea boxes/stalls, colloquially known as Pottie Kadai (small shops), are a common sight in the city. One can find them on the edge of streets or bypass roads sitting on the pavement or below the curb of a pavement. They are located outside shopping malls or office buildings or areas with usually high commercial activities. 

The box, a fabricated metal structure, usually blue in color, unfolds in the morning around 6.00 hours and folds/shuts around 23.00 hours, depending on the area it is located in. It is a simple cuboid, with a small metal door on one side of the box to enter, and a window which faces the road, low enough for people to interact with the owner. Apart from tea, the stall owners sell snacks, cigarettes, water bottles, and newspapers. Exchange of orders occur over a counter, which is a metal slab fixed with nuts and bolts and a small top hung window that opens and closes mechanically. The shutter when opened acts like a shade fixed by two simple hinges at either end. A temporary tarpaulin cover fixed to the stall or a tree shelters the space outside the stall. This setup is also a disclaimer of the territory, a shared one, rather than owned. The interior of the box is skillfully planned with just enough storage for a gas cylinder, a burner or stove, and some utensils. On the whole, it does not occupy more than 15 to 20 square feet of area and is an impressive pragmatic lesson in space efficiency and anthropometric measurements. 

The space that surrounds these boxes is cleaned at regular intervals by the stall owners, who maintain an unspoken discipline to avoid any sort of clutter or traffic, and any detritus is carefully discarded. Posters stuck on the front facade of the box below the counter act as surface decorators animating the metal sheet–and hence the street–and a new image is introduced every day. In this shared space, passersby learn of happenings and controversies through a glance at the posters. People can stare at the box for minutes, without asking for tea, and the stall owner is neither amused nor perplexed by this act. It’s almost as if the visitor is in a silent conversation with the news on the wall, making the urban object an active participant in the conversation. This everyday experience enhances the presence of these objects; adding a layer to the city and its mundane routine. It is an experience frozen in time.

Love - Labor

The smell of the fresh tea served with hot savories draws easy attention to these boxes. Whether it is the sound of ginger getting crushed in the pestle or the smell of cardamom getting grated to add to the variety of tea that these stalls offer, all of it is an act of love and labor. The final stage of preparing the tea involves a unique stunt: using a pitcher with a long handle, the preparer pours the hot tea from an elevated position (sometimes with their arm above their head) into a pan below, doing so repeatedly in a sequential manner with absolute precision. Social media enthusiasts don’t hesitate to take out their phones and capture this in slow-motion videos, making headlines in their social media accounts and gathering likes. The tea preparer willingly accepts this free publicity without questioning it as a hindrance to their privacy. 

With no consistent pattern, people usually throng in the early hours, post-lunch, and late evenings to grab a cup of tea and some snacks to mark the transitions between work and rest. It brings together people from every social stratum, the crowd devoid of caste, color, sex, or creed. One can find the CEO of a company gathered with their colleagues chuckling about the monotonous work conditions, and in the same instance a laborer of the working class. Office goers loosen their ties and take off their jackets, and start to settle into the atmosphere of informal encounters in this public space. There is no sense of fear, or delusion of being watched, or of being judged. There are even stray dogs who frequently visit the stalls. These unclaimed pets who wander around looking for their “space in the city” are free customers as well, patted by strangers who, while waiting in anticipation for their tea, offer snacks to the pets to satisfy their hunger. The drama in and around the Pottie Kadai never ceases to intrigue. The setting and characters shift, making onlookers continuously wonder, “What’s next?”. 

The faint whispers of conversations are verbal scripts floating in mid-air. There is a story underlying each conversation; the stall acts as a stage, unfolding itself for people’s narratives. The theatrics generated is indirectly governed by the tea seller. Here, strangers share gazes or a soft smile, sparking an unexpected connection. It is a casual behavior, without a preconceived agenda, a demonstration of natural human curiosities that allows these encounters with strangers to exist cohesively. The casualness is honest and the atmosphere is created through the senses of sight, sound, and smell—all of which are pure. 

Today, amid the frequent talk about designing and developing inclusive environments, the urban objects in the form of tea stalls sub-consciously address inclusivity. It is important to notice how unplanned behavioral orders organize themselves into social experiments. The design process moves along a continuum because the narrative in the space begins only with the placement of the box and is embraced by different people at different hours of the day. A participatory design process wherein the user, unaware of their contribution, is adding layers to space and engaging in a dialogue concerning a stationary urban object.  To wonder about such dynamics of space caused by simple objects also grounds the reality of a city and its people who are willing to take a  “hiatus in time”. It is a labor of love, an unconscious act of bringing people together, allowing chance encounters and uncertainties to thrive in inertia, leading to ephemeral experiences. 

Love - Labor - Lost 

In most cases, the people who own these stalls are not city dwellers. They do not trouble their conscience with questions on their identity or feeling of belonging in the city, rather they blend quietly in the chaos of the city. Offering a taste of their cultural roots in the form of a cup of tea, they express purity when found in that space through strangers who become a part of their routine. This purity is demonstrated in their style of communicating through their native language at times giving a hint of the place they come from. It is also evident from the smile and sometimes also through their attire and  the body language, with which they greet their guests who are lost in the hustle-bustle while they find themselves.

Managed by not more than two people, the stalls are registered to the local municipal authority. They are legalized, not “lost” or treated as illegal encroachments, and thus form an integral part of the city. The stall owners enter into a minimum yearly lease with the government, allowing them to run their business without any hindrance for that time period. The primary reason for the success of this business lies in the people’s love for tea and its easy set-up. The government today provides bank loans to encourage this small-scale income model, which has encouraged a lot of people who migrate from smaller towns and villages in search of better economic opportunities. These small-scale ventures have contributed largely to the micro-economics of the city.

The location of these stalls—humble urban objects sitting outside large glass boxes—highlights a contrasting character of the city, reinforcing the fact that Indian cities can be wildly complex. This urban paradox threatens the many worlds that exist in one space,[3] yet it is this contrast that keeps the dynamics of an Indian city alive. For with the changing urban character and increase in commercialization, these stalls fear the wrath of realtors and their constant nagging to move away from their  buildings. 

Today, Indian cities include two components occupying the same physical space: the static city and the kinetic city. The static city, built of more permanent materials such as concrete, steel, and brick, is perceived as a monumental, two-dimensional entity on conventional city maps. The kinetic city–incomprehensible as a two-dimensional entity—is perceived as a city in motion, a three-dimensional construct of incremental development. The kinetic city is not perceived as architecture.[4] It presents a compelling vision that enables us to better understand the blurred lines of contemporary urbanism and the changing roles of people and spaces in urban society.

Distributed across the city, tea stalls perhaps offer the same character as a large public space would do, but in smaller pockets. The high-rises of a city, unfamiliar traffic, and the adrenaline rush of large crowds can always be intimidating. Planned public spaces in cities sometime fail because of their scale, location and design.  Cities plan public spaces, but the design doesn't always work: people don't gather and these spaces fail to be used efficiently.  The Pottie Kadai act as breathers, becoming loci for collective memories because of the scale and scattered locations. The space, though not conventionally designed, is efficient in allowing people to assemble and disassemble in a given moment.  While we root for larger and complex visions as the identity for the city, it is the “small” and “simple” that draws us towards the humane, allowing one to indulge in the character of a place, contributing to the identity of the city . 

If the city is a machine, these objects are the small nuts and bolts forming its essential parts and allowing essential movements to occur. They can be replaced but not discarded. While in search of utopia (through over-planning and over-design) the “simple” is often missed. While looking for greater experiences we often fail to address the joys of smaller encounters. It is these few minutes of temporal experiences that form the collage of memories and musings of our lives. The activity around tea stalls offers a moment where some of our personal narratives can fold and unfold. These small, ephemeral moments are perhaps the crux of life. The small is essential. And  beautiful.  

References

[1]  Kullarhs are small cups made of clay very popular in the northern and eastern parts of India. Tea is served in them and the customers can either discard them or reuse them. 

[2]

[3] Biswas, Ramesh. “One Space, Many Worlds.” Edited by Kazi Asharf. Made In India 77, no. 6 (November 30, 2007): 24–25..

[4]  Mehrotra, Rahul , Ed. Huyssen, Andreas, “Kinetic City” Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imageries in a Globalizing Age, Duke University Press, London 2008

Mehrotra, Rahul , Ed. Huyssen, Andreas, “Kinetic City” Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imageries in a Globalizing Age, Duke University Press, London 2008

Khilani, Sunil. “The India Project.” Edited by Kazi Asharf. Made In India 77, no. 6 (November 30, 2007): 12–15.

Shoonya Kumar is an Associate Professor at MEASI Academy of Architecture, Chennai India and is interested in urban public spaces, architecture and its relation to cinema and urban imageries. He lives in Chennai and participated in the WriteON 2020 workshop series.  

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