I'm stuck in the throes of a pilani tea craving. And my new-found obsession with filter coffee has fizzled out. After a month of fighting off intoxication at Coffee Day counters (PB pure and Plantation A beans are expert nostril-raiders who seldom spare my olfactory lobes that obligatory neuronal short-circuiting that disrupts brain activity three hours afterwards. Watching the attendant comforting polythene packs bursting with coffee with those digestive pats mothers use to push babies off the brink of a burp doesn't help. Nor does feeling their hot anger of diminution through printed plastic through the journey back. It takes the hotter stimulus of a steaming coffee tumbler in your hand to cure you.) A month of adding caffeinated post-scripts to Murugan idli meals braving blatant "Why?" looks that my sister is apt to shoot.

I'm one of those sickeningly typical creatures who prove all those pseudo-universal adages starting with "After all it's human to...."right. It's human to long only for absent loves while taking everyone else for granted. It's human to fall desperately in love with what is lost to you forever. It's human to choose exactly those things which are worst for you. (This one's from Rowling I think). It's human to love the dead far more intensely than their live presences would have ever deserved.

I started calling myself a tea-drinker in Pilani -a place that gets people seeking a well-traveled boast to begin many journeys at once and then end up in places they would rather not have found themselves in. (but useful to construct charming never-heard-before anecdotes out of all the same. What else matters but winning the crowd while appearing to scorn them?) The more perilous ones drive you towards alcoholism, pot-addiction, a supercilious belief in your superiority to the rest of humanity while simultaneously allowing loneliness to hollow your soul out, a misplaced sense of pride in a dystopian world view that is cultivated carefully to look cool, multiply enhanced respect for sarcasm and belief that it's the supreme form of humour and that secretly fostered lovechild -insecurity in defects previously invisible. Was that in ascending order? Yes, I checked. I guess I’ve been more fortunate. I ended up with merely a gastronomic issue.

The seed of any habit is a harmless imitation. The way you order exactly what the other person is ordering at a restaurant. Not because you want to conform or please them but because you don't really know enough to have strong preferences. Then it becomes a group ritual, just one more feature of your time together with a person or a set of them. Once you develop a private relationship with the habit, (the day you start ordering tea in double-chai doses alone without realizing that you've already done 6 cups that day.) you're done for.

Tea from the beverage machine here is an optimization problem. I have to optimize the tea-bag diffusion operation in a way that maximizes flavour absorption and minimizes cooling-down-to-tastelessness time. As for the street side tea stalls, an all-male domain that I ventured to buy from, the tea was probably the third infusion of infinitely reused tea powder and tasted of the strainer it was poured through several times with those expert hand maneuvers that would make a bystander wonder if it was tea or gravity-defying plasma.