Kaapi is coffee, right? Of course, yes. But is that what this column is about? Discerning readers may exclaim, ‘Ayyo, of all things coffee!’ And if Tamil-speaking, they may well add, ‘Vereyvelaiillaiya?’ (Does he have nothing better to do?) Or, what a friend tells me would in Kannada be, ‘Nimmaadyategaluyellive?’ (Where are your priorities?)
At a time when the world is more than likely, truly, seriously to get morphed by artificial intelligence into shapes we cannot recognise, or blow itself up in a fit of Trumpian hauteur or Netanyahuesque rage before anyone can say ‘Stop’, and when this fascinating new phenomenon in India called Gen Z is surging ahead to destinations not yet fully charted, when Haryana is triumphing in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games to our exhilaration, here starts a column with, of all things, coffee as its theme. What is the world coming to?
Let me say that kaapi it is, though not like in ‘India ranks 7th in the world’s production of coffee and 5th in its export’. But yes, in other lesser known aspects of it, such as 96 percent of the country’s production of that wonder bean comes from South India, for I am, in my DNA, quite south Indian and know my coffee as kaapi, from when my mother used to get it for me, a typical spoilt Indian lout, in a tumbler and dabara.
Dabara? The word sounds like the name of a little musical instrument, but is what the squat round receptacle in which the coffee-bearing tumbler sits, as a cup does on a saucer, except that the dabara is far more integral to the transaction, being saucer, heat-insulator, back-up cup and a perfect flat-bottomed, tilt-cum-spill preventer.
As a school kid and then a teenager, every year I used to take the Grand Trunk Express from Delhi, where I lived with my parents, one Gujarati and the other Tamil, to Madras, as Chennai then was, to spend the summer holidays with my Tamil maternal grandfather. The two-day, two-night journey began in Delhi with waiters and vendors selling ‘Chaai chaai, garam chaai’. The emphasis was on garam, hot. Crossing the shadow line between north and south somewhere after Nagpur, you woke in the middle of Night Two in the south, when ‘Chaai chaai, garam chaai’ was overtaken by ‘Kaapi, kaapi, kaa-aa-pi’. No reference was made to kaapi’s temperature for kaapi is by definition hot. When it is not, it is not kaapi any longer; it was kaapi.
My grandfather liked his kaapi not just hot, but very hot, though a story was around that the veteran Madrasi liked his kaapi so hot that he had to hold it within the double-fold of his angavastram while sipping it. This of course was an exaggeration perpetuated by kaapi fans who were also Rajaji fans.
While no prefix like garam is called for in kaapi, there is one typically Tamil-English prefix for it: degree. High-quality kaapi is degree kaapi. The noun-turned-adjective says it all. One even higher degree of degree coffee is called Kumbakonam degree kaapi. There the beverage is getting a PhD. Why exactly the hometown of the mathematics prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan should be linked to kaapi I cannot fathom, but there is a subtle felicity to it. He who knew infinity must have known kaapi’s inexhaustible values.
But if in Tamil India, it is Kumbakonam degree kaapi, in Karnataka it should be called Mysore degree kaapi. ‘How would you like your coffee, sir?’ a stewardess once asked R K Narayan on board an international flight, ‘White or black?’ The author of Malgudi Days was perplexed. ‘White or black? I don’t understand... I want it brown, as all good coffee is in my town, Mysore.’
Narayan knew Carnatic music as well as he knew his kaapi.
G R Gopinath, ‘Captain’ to his friends, is all about flying aircraft for simple folk, but I have learnt more from this grower of coffee about the bean’s original home in India—Chikkamagalur—than from anyone else. And that learning includes worries about the future of this gift of gifts, owing to climate change, problems with labour laws and market bumps. May the bean survive all these.
I will end on a variant of the theme. When contemplating a title for this column and thinking of kaapi, I thought of the raga Kapi. I cannot tell a Kapi from a Kalyani, and so I googled it to find musical genius M D Ramanathan’s rendering of a Tyagaraja composition in Kapi, ‘Anyayamu seyakura Rama’ (Do not be unfair to me, Rama). I simply drowned in it. Ayyo, what a rendering! When I went into the comments under the entry, to my delight I found kaapi. The following comments joined them, as do the tumbler and the dabara. I have deleted only the comment-makers’ names from the excerpts, keeping the spellings unchanged:
The most wonderfull rendrings of the unmatched geniuses of classical music. Like Rama Pahi this one also a degree coffee. It is Kumbakonam degree copy. What a depth in the raga alapanam. Very soothing raga alapana.
On the first of this month, at a memorial concert for musicologist Kalyani Menon in Chennai’s Music Academy, young Vignesh Ishwar rendered the raga unforgettably—‘Janakiramana’ by Vanamamalai Jeeyar. With Sangita Kalanidhi R K Shriramkumar playing the violin entrancingly beside him, Vignesh gave us degree Kapi, Kumbakonam degree Kapi. And in a tumbler-dabara combo that in Latin would be vita contemplativa. He made his listeners take pause from all that suffuses our lives for a moment where the only demand made of us is plain and simple surrender.
Read all columns by Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Former Governor of West Bengal and Bihar
