One day, when I was sitting at home aimlessly,which is actually the case very often a distant thought from my college life traced its way back to my mind. At the very first semester when I had first entered my extra-departmental course class which I had chosen as sociology, the teacher had asked all of us a question. “ Is tea just tea?”. As the students in the class, including me tried to evade the question with a silent, uncertain nod she charged back. “ NO!”, she said, “Tea made out of the tea leaves are not just leaves, they are the hard work of all those migrant labourers of Assam…”, and then she continued her emotional discourse about tea which I was never able to relate to sociology and thus I was not once seen in that class anymore.
But today, when I sit quietly in front of my writing desk sipping from a glass containing that same beverage with my preferred combination of more milk and less tea, thoughts from that mundane extra-departmental class drift back. This makes me ask that same question to myself again, “Is tea just tea?”. Today I can answer with utmost surety. No, tea is never just tea. Being born and brought up in this mesmerizing city called Kolkata I have come to understand that tea was always the elixir for this living breathing city of joy. Tea has the unique quality of initiating vehement debates, creating new love stories,bonding family members, accompanying you on lonely nights and fresh mornings and what not. I always feel that if there was some way of extracting the memory out of tea glasses, that is, the conversations people had over a cup of tea then subjects like history, sociology, philosophy and the like would never have to take aid from other sources. Entire societal structures and formations along with its complete analysis could be derived from these tea glasses itself…
Do you know what could make this evolution possible in social science? The answer is simple, its just another glass of hot, steaming tea.
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