When coffee shops attack...

When i was 17 and a student at NIFT (or the National Institute for Future Tailors as we were wont to call it), there used to be a tiny eatery in the Chandrika hotel basement that served the most phenomenal Aloo Parathas. Looking back i wonder if that memory of the aforementioned parathas was based on my circumstances at the time. I was broke, spent all my money on colour pencils and was fresh out of boarding school in South india. Aloo parathas were relatively exotic for someone who had spent the last 7 years holed up in Period architechture in the Nilagiris. Anyway, i stray from the narrative. The reason i wonder about this at age 23 is that i ran into a familiar looking man in glasses and Orange t-shirt today. He walked up to me and asked me if i ever studied in NIFT and that caught me off guard. At first i thought he might have been some obscure management senior of mine, but it turns out he's the guy who used to run the paratha place.

I managed to thwart his friendly overtures with monosyllabic aswers and eventually he gave up and moved on. I was too busy at the time immersing myself in some glorious fiction ala David Mitchell's 'Number 9 Dream' interspersed with intense rounds of Sega tennis on my phone to welcome this intrusion. When he slunk off defeated, i noticed that his orange tee had the Barista logo emblazoned on it.

Barista indiranagar is where i eat lunch on most days, a place of respite where i catch up on reading between meetings etc. Recently they've changed caterers and the food has taken a turn for the worse. Alarmingly so. They seem to think patrons prefer their new line up of soggy, stale half-ass Mexican chicken wraps to the creamy chicken pastas of yestermonths. Did Mr.Orange T Glasses have some hand in this turnaround, this homogenization... this pandering to mediocrity? I think they should maybe consider serving Aloo parathas, curd and pickle instead.