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I clearly recall the first time I heard the phrase: "Tea Party"
I was 4 then and was a precocious player on the midsize carrom board my Father bought and taught the game to me. My Father was not yet a HM...just a Science Teacher in his Village High School. His school was over by 5 PM or so but he would return home at 6 after a game of ball-badminton, maybe, in his school. And after my outdoor play, I would run home and set the carrom board and wait for the arrival of my Father keenly.
That evening, however, I was waiting and waiting and it was 7 by the time he returned and that was too late for him to play with me; and I was disappointed and asked him why he came home so late. And he replied, with a gleam in his eyes:
"Today is our payday and all of us teachers had a Tea Party in the school."
That was the first I heard of Tea and Party...two neat rhyming words.
We never had tea in our house nor in our Village then. Our parents were coffee addicts. It was 2 decades later that tea started appearing in our South Indian markets. And housewives discovered that tea was half as expensive as coffee. And it was much less hassle to make tea than coffee for which you have to buy seeds, roast them, grind them, buy a filter, wait overnight for the decoction to seep and then proceed. Coffee needed much milk and sugar since the raw 'liquor' is quite bitter.
But tea was available in ready-made packets. All they had to do was to boil water, add a little milk, sugar, and a pinch of tea dust, take a piece of cloth, and strain the damn thing. But when they tried to drink it, they would grimace, for it was nowhere as tasty as coffee...tastes are all acquired. So, they used to make tea exclusively for their maids. And if the tea got exhausted, they would stoop to a mean subterfuge: reuse the tea powder stored in the cloth and substitute cheap jaggery for sugar.
So, Father's Tea Parties had no tea...just a sweet (mysore pak), a hot (begun bhajji), and a cup of coffee. And the teachers would all go mad on it, for, payday used to come as unpredictably as rain. It could be 10th or 20th but never the first week of the month. And folks who were more overjoyed than the teachers were the milkmaid, dhobi, itinerant veg vendress, shopkeepers, servant maid...practically the whole Village. Everything was on credit but with 0% interest unlike on Personal Loans. Upon discharging all their debts, all teachers would go broke till the next Tea Party.
One day Father and I were walking by the road and I spotted a dozen and more crows sitting on a clothesline cawing like there was no tomorrow:
And I pointed the sight to my Father; and he said:
When I read this news item, I was amazed at the coincidence since I never thought of that fat book for all of 40 years. Talk of bizarre coincidences!:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/03/bizarre-coincidences.html
The next Tea Party I heard of was in my Class XI Social Studies. Our teacher went ecstatic describing how Americans dumped bags and bags of East India Company's tea overboard from ships in the Boston Harbor.
Ship? Harbor? Tea? East India Company? Boston? It was all pure romance:
On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and other political protests often refer to it.
`Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
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"The tea party at the stock markets for FIIs is expected to continue at least for 2013's first quarter."
...DC, EDIT Page, Tuesday 25 December 2012
I clearly recall the first time I heard the phrase: "Tea Party"
I was 4 then and was a precocious player on the midsize carrom board my Father bought and taught the game to me. My Father was not yet a HM...just a Science Teacher in his Village High School. His school was over by 5 PM or so but he would return home at 6 after a game of ball-badminton, maybe, in his school. And after my outdoor play, I would run home and set the carrom board and wait for the arrival of my Father keenly.
That evening, however, I was waiting and waiting and it was 7 by the time he returned and that was too late for him to play with me; and I was disappointed and asked him why he came home so late. And he replied, with a gleam in his eyes:
"Today is our payday and all of us teachers had a Tea Party in the school."
That was the first I heard of Tea and Party...two neat rhyming words.
We never had tea in our house nor in our Village then. Our parents were coffee addicts. It was 2 decades later that tea started appearing in our South Indian markets. And housewives discovered that tea was half as expensive as coffee. And it was much less hassle to make tea than coffee for which you have to buy seeds, roast them, grind them, buy a filter, wait overnight for the decoction to seep and then proceed. Coffee needed much milk and sugar since the raw 'liquor' is quite bitter.
But tea was available in ready-made packets. All they had to do was to boil water, add a little milk, sugar, and a pinch of tea dust, take a piece of cloth, and strain the damn thing. But when they tried to drink it, they would grimace, for it was nowhere as tasty as coffee...tastes are all acquired. So, they used to make tea exclusively for their maids. And if the tea got exhausted, they would stoop to a mean subterfuge: reuse the tea powder stored in the cloth and substitute cheap jaggery for sugar.
So, Father's Tea Parties had no tea...just a sweet (mysore pak), a hot (begun bhajji), and a cup of coffee. And the teachers would all go mad on it, for, payday used to come as unpredictably as rain. It could be 10th or 20th but never the first week of the month. And folks who were more overjoyed than the teachers were the milkmaid, dhobi, itinerant veg vendress, shopkeepers, servant maid...practically the whole Village. Everything was on credit but with 0% interest unlike on Personal Loans. Upon discharging all their debts, all teachers would go broke till the next Tea Party.
One day Father and I were walking by the road and I spotted a dozen and more crows sitting on a clothesline cawing like there was no tomorrow:
And I pointed the sight to my Father; and he said:
"They are having a Tea Party"
That stuck. He could be witty at times.
There was this Iyer's Coffee Hotel in our Village. That was the only eatery. Pure veg. There was no Military Hotel (non-veg...why Military, I don't know). And when I went on a holiday to our Nellore Town, there were several Coffee Hotels. The jewel in the crown was Kamala Vilas. It is still there standing proudly for all of 80 years maybe. All our so-called Hotels were just restaurants (a word I learned in my University City of Vizagh...didn't know the right pronunciation though).
The other day I was talking about Arthur Hailey's book, Hotel. And the next morning I found this news in ToI:
Floyd Cardoz, a leading Indian Chef, settled in America, recently won the Top Chef Masters show. He trained in biochemistry in Bombay. And chose our standard Nellore Breakfast dish called Upma for his grand finale. (I am an expert in upma-making...I survived solely on it for four years before I got married). And Cardoz turned to his chef profession after reading Arthur Hailey's Hotel.
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/03/bizarre-coincidences.html
The next Tea Party I heard of was in my Class XI Social Studies. Our teacher went ecstatic describing how Americans dumped bags and bags of East India Company's tea overboard from ships in the Boston Harbor.
Ship? Harbor? Tea? East India Company? Boston? It was all pure romance:
On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident remains an iconic event of American history, and other political protests often refer to it.
...wiki
And the next enigmatic Tea Party I read about was the Mad Tea Party in Alice:
`Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
`I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, `so
I can't take more.'
`You mean you can't take less,' said the Hatter: `it's very
easy to take more than nothing.'
And finally, last Obama Election bid was reverberating with a word new to my limited lexicon:
Republican Tea Party
By 2001, a custom had developed among some conservative activists of mailing tea bags to legislators and other officials as an act of symbolism.[25]
...wiki
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