The Hindu Business Line : Of filter coffee & Ooty

As our Tata Indica steadily climbed the curvy road linking Coimbatore to Ooty, Ananthan and myself decided to have a break. The air was winterish and one craved for a fresh, hot cup of filter coffee. We parked our car at a coffee shop with a board boasting an offer of filter coffee.

We ordered two cups of coffee while Kasinathan, our driver, went for tea. "Sir, in 15 minutes the coffee will be ready," said the middle-aged owner in English with sacred ash smeared over his forehead. He disappeared into the darkness behind the shop while his son told us the filter coffee served was the best. As one lighted a cigarette, the coffee came in small, plastic cups. It tasted of sand mixed with water. It was the worst coffee one ever had and the shopowner merited a corporate award for bluffing us with conviction.

Nowhere in Nilgiris and Coimbatore can one get pristine, filter coffee. Seemingly, no one has heard of it after Nescafe started manhandling the taste buds of South Indians. Nescafe is not coffee like Nestle is not an Indian company. There is concern over Coke and Pepsi knocking over home-made healthy drinks, while none is bothered over the death of filter coffee and the culture going with it.

My friend Bhojan told me "filter coffee is not there in Tamil Nadu" and he should know. The man starts his mornings roasting and grinding fresh coffee beans and then places the powder in a stainless steel coffee filter to arrive at the godly, aromatic decoction to which he adds a dash of fresh milk. "I prepare my coffee every morning. That gives my day the auspicious start," he said.

Ananthan is not a filter coffee-man (preferring tea) and could not appreciate my sadness. For me, it is Bertram Wooster without Jeeves. Yet life goes on.

At Coimbatore one could pick up quality tapioca and banana chips. Foreign and Indian companies are not yet excited leaving the locals alone. Before starting for Nilgiris, the family had reminded me of buying the famed chips of Coimbatore and Ananthan took me to a shop of 1967-vintage called `Banaanaa Slice: The House of Chips'.

Waiting for the plane to Mumbai, a traveller asked me whether the chips one was carrying were for sale. He offered to double the price one had paid and I turned down the bid. "There is nothing better than Coimbatore chips," he told me wistfully and one relished his disappointment.

By around two in the afternoon we were at Ooty, shivering a bit as cold, raindrops unhinged themselves from a thick mist. Through a week, we flitted in and out of Ooty and this writer did not like the hill station resembling more the many, unkempt railway stations.

Ooty is dirty with plastic waste and vehicle fumes. There is no class or elegance. Hotels and resorts climb into each other, anyway. One was reminded of Martin Luther being disillusioned with 16th century Rome.

Ross King in the book Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, writing of Luther's visit says, "The city of Rome itself was, in Luther's view, a dump. Rubbish covered the banks of the Tiber, into which the cloaca maxima, an open sewer, drained the waste tipped from windows. Rubble seemed to be scattered everywhere, and the facades of many churches suffered the indignity of being draped with animal hides placed there by tanners.

"So unhealthy was the air that when Luther made the mistake of sleeping beside an open window, he suffered an attack of what he diagnosed, erroneously, as malaria. ... The Romans themselves were no better. Luther, who would later become renowned for his obscene wit and toilet humour, was disgusted at how people shamelessly relieved their bladders in the street. They urinated so indiscriminately that to deter the culprits it was necessary to hang on the exterior wall a religious icon such as a portrait of St. Sebastian or St. Anthony."

Keep aside a few green patches and there is only cement and cars in Ooty. Ooty is like 16th century Rome. Smartly laid out tea gardens on hill slopes punctuated with tall silver oaks are stealthily eating into forest cover.

Over 30 years, Bhojan has been a helpless witness to the decline of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve into a crowded, money churning, tourist resort. Some relief came when he took us one evening to the tea estates in the Aggal area, on the Aravenu-Alakkarai road.

Over the last three years, Bhojan and his friends have been tracking a black leopard living in a cave atop a hill taken over by tea plantations. We walked past tea gardens and settled down on a rock facing the cave waiting for the black panther to come out on its evening stroll.

Ananthan located himself at a spot nearer the cave to click the animal. We were sceptical, but at around 5.30 p.m. the black panther strolled out and stayed in the open till about 5.45 p.m.

S.H. Prater says black panthers can be located in the Western Ghats. "A black panther is not a distinct species. Both black and normal-coloured cubs may be produced in the same litter. Blackness, the general darkening of colour, is due to the excessive presence of a substance called melanin which intensifies pigmentation, and the production of melanin is increased where there is a combination of high temperature, great humidity, and reduced light," Prater mentions.

Little is known of its feeding habits. The animal has not attacked the men and women working in the tea estates. Sometimes it lifts cattle or stray dogs, says Bhojan.

P. Devarajan

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