Garam chai, desi ishtyle!

If you have travelled abroad, especially USA and Europe, have you become desperate to get one decent cup of tea. There, tea usually means a tepid looking , golden hued drink. They dunk a tepid tea bag into a glass of hot water and serve it to us Indians as tea. We are used to drinking chai and such a drink could cure us of tea forever. But for us, the suffering is small; the moment we reach India, chai is served the way we want it right on the streets.  So then what about Indians who live and work there and between work, look for a chai break to refresh their mind?

Most had to make do with coffee but some found a way out and a business opportunity. Gaurav Chawla, a software engineer working in the Silicon Valley has developed a prototype which actually makes chai the Indian way. Known as Chime machine, it brews one cup of chai at a time, using tea and spices pre-mixed in caps sold by the startup. This venture is funded by pre-orders at a freshly launched www.brewchime.com website at a temporarily discounted price of $249. They will be shipped (only in USA) from March 2017.

Another chai venture was the brainchild of Paawan Kothari – Chai Cart. She has a masters from INSEAD business school in France and spent more than a decade working with technology firms in Silicon Valley. In 209 she set up this start-up that chai from carts on San Francisco streets. She started making  piced tea in her home and peddling it in the Mission District from a bicycle trailer. Soon business boomed so much that she quit her job in IBM to launch Chai cart.

Indeed necessity is the mother of invention, sometimes, very profitable too.