Caffeine Lows

It's A jump cut straight out of Godard-from the none-too-ecstatic '80s to the nebulous '90s-as I step into the College Street Coffee House. It was in the mid-'80s that I had last visited the place. More then a decade on, the eatery hasn't changed all that much. Not physically at any rate. But I sense some-thing missing. Soon enough, I know what. The lazy, languid, laidback pace of yore is gone, its place taken by a more businesslike, functional, perhaps even stuffy, air. Habitues-academics, students, writers and artists who still spend hours there discussiong everything from Ray to Rwanda, Rilke to Ritwik, revolution to road safety over endless rounds of coffee and peppy pakoras-are a trifle peeved with the way things are shaping up in the 40-year-old watering hole. The price of a cup of coffee has been hiked from Rs 3.50 to Rs 5 and the Coffee House Consumes' Forum is fuming. Why, they ask, should people who contribute so much to Calcutta's robust culture life have to pay through their nose for a 'lifesaving' beverage, the elixir that keeps them alive in a benighted city that was declared comatose years ago? But the workers' cooperative that now runs the Coffee House has no patience for such entreaties. It is determined to do something about the low salaries of the employees; hence the steep price hike. Aren't the daily needs of their families more important than the indulgences of the intellectuals? Tricky territory that, but the fact remains that the Coffee House, as we know it, is too good an idea to sacrifice at the altar of commercial exigencies.