India: The Art of Chai and the Country That Runs on It
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India produces more tea than any country except China, and consumes most of it internally. Chai — spiced milk tea — is not a drink in India so much as an institution. The chai wallah — the tea seller — is present on railway platforms, street corners, office complexes, and construction sites. The tea arrives in a small clay cup or a glass, sweet, strong, spiced with cardamom and sometimes ginger, ginger and pepper, or ginger and lemongrass depending on the region and the vendor's preference. When the cup is finished, the clay one is smashed on the ground and returned to the earth.
India contains more distinct cultures within its borders than most of the rest of the world combined. There are 22 officially recognised languages, hundreds of regional ones, and thousands of dialects. The food changes completely every few hundred kilometres — Punjabi wheat and cream, Bengali fish and mustard, Rajasthani lentils and dried mango, Tamil coconut and tamarind, Goan seafood and Portuguese spice. The cuisine is not one tradition. It is dozens of complete traditions that happen to occupy the same political entity.
Yoga originated in India approximately 5,000 years ago and has become the world's most widely practised physical and spiritual discipline — over 300 million practitioners globally. The modern international version stripped of much of its original philosophical context is still, at its best, a transmission of something genuine: a system of attention to the relationship between breath, body, and mind that accumulated over millennia of observation. India gave the world this. The world is still absorbing it.
