My Favourite Tea Kadai

My favourite tea kadai.

Kadai (கடை), for those who don't know Tamil, simply means a 'shop' or a 'stall'. My student life lasted ten years, the first five of which were spent in a university in Hyderabad, doing my undergrad and postgrad studies, and the next five were spent in a reasonably well known (atleast among nerds) institute in Chennai. The tougher five of those ten years were in Chennai, as I needed to work twice as hard as I did in college, and the atmosphere there was a tad lonely. Thanks to a very close friend from the neighbouring journalism institute, I came across this tea kadai run by a very sweet Malayali uncle, and his two cooks. Ever since my second year in Chennai began, I used to go there every evening for that one cup of tea, and biscuits, to just relieve myself of the academic stress. Very soon, I developed an attachment to that kadai. Enjoyed my little conversations with the cooks, and sometimes with the uncle. I miss Chennai a lot, but of all, I miss this kadai the most. So on one of these days, when I was feeling very nostalgic, I decided to draw a sketch of this little shop (from a photo I took of the place). In the sketch is one of the cooks, and a customer who after a hard day at work, came to have some tea (or pick up a smoke), while probably waiting for his food at a hotel nearby.

The Good Ol' Chennai Local

In the five years of my Ph.D in Chennai, I used to spend my weekends exploring parts of the city. On many occasions, I used to take the local train to go out. The Chennai local isn't a madly crowded one, like its Bombay counterpart, thus, a ride in them is quite a joy ride. One day, I decided to randomly go for a ride in the train upto its last station (Chennai Beach) and come back in the same one to my stop (Indira Nagar). On the way, I clicked a photo inside my bogie, which I made a sketch out of. Here's the sketch.

The Good Ol' Chennai Local

Peace of Mind

Like any young person in his/her early twenties, I joined facebook and twitter. Peer pressure is what pulled me towards facebook. I must admit I did start spending too much of my free time on it, posting updates, photos (silly ones back then in 2009) and more often than not, it spilt over to my study time. Then came games on facebook like Angry Birds, Crazy Taxi etc., which ate up quite a bit of the free time I had during vacations.

In the end of 2010, the development of photography as my main hobby began, with the posting of a huge bunch of pictures from a trip to Delhi and Agra, in December of that year. The likes received made me want to post more. Thus, after finishing my Masters, five months later, in May 2011, I started posting pictures I took from my DSLR camera. As far as photography sharing on facebook was concerned, I was ok with whatever response I got, after all, it's something I did for myself.

Apart from photos, I would post shared posts, news articles, and sometimes my own opinions, jokes (my horrible sense of humour :P) and sometimes, I would tweet from my twitter account (which was then linked to facebook). My senior during my PhD years, started making judgemental remarks about me being 'online', I would shout back telling that the thing is logged in on my phone, whether I am using it or not. That was the first time I saw red on being on social media. As work got intense, I reduced posting to about one or two posts a day. Plus it started to dawn on me that a lot of people may think I'm an attention seeking monger. A lot of people in my list (my mother and father's friends included) started messaging my sister, and I used to get scathing messages from her now and then, even if I had reduced and controlled my posting. Added to that the amount of negativity and hatred in the posts on my news feed had increased exponentially, which started to make me a negative person as well. Thus, I decided to deactivate my account for a month at a stretch, then go back to it (at least for communication with friends whose numbers I didn't have) for three or four months, and then deactivate it again. During the deactivation periods, I would sit and read, which I enjoyed hell of a lot. But each time I would get back, I would see more of hatred and negativity, of course there would be the odd positive, inspiring posts (a photograph by one of my photography idols or a piece of artwork by two of artists whose works I love to see). But the problem was that this negativity started eating up my time. Same thing on twitter as well (as far as the material I would see is concerned). 

What did I do next? Nothing surprising. Before leaving for Poona for my post doctoral studies this January, I deleted my facebook account. Alas, the peace of mind. One big key realization was that facebook and twitter, which are 'social' media, made me unsocial in real life.