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BOOKS
AUTHORSPEAK
E. JAIWANT PAUL
Teatime Treat
The first thought
that strikes you when you enter the south Delhi home of former Brooke
Bond India director E. Jaiwant Paul is that he was probably in the army:
antique weapons of rare beauty adorn the walls. The military bearing and
public school mannerisms of the man point (deceptively) to a brandy- and-brass
background. Mention this to Paul, 72, and he laughs uncontrollably. Apparently
"everybody says that at the first meeting" but as the jacket
of The Story of Tea (Roli) points out, Paul is a "hard core corporate
executive". Seventeen years with a mammoth tea company certainly
gives one a great vantage point for recounting the tale of the globally
gulped beverage ("did you know that tea is consumed by just about
half the world's population?").
 Paul
is no stranger to the word processor. He has authored three books on historical
themes (including traditional Indian weapons, an obvious passion). And
it shows in the ease with which the vast, rather unwieldy universe of
the book is held together-from the legends surrounding the origin of the
fragrant brew to prosaic, modern-day marketing concerns.
It's an easy journey that starts with the tea-drinking
culture of ancient China. From there, sacks of the leaf were carted westwards
in Persian caravans and later reached the rest of the world via European
trading companies. The Indian plantations are a story in themselves-of
British planters cutting through jungles to establish estates that worked
on cheap, exploited native labour and the Indian planters who inherited
their "lonely but comfortable" life after independence. Paul
adds a vivid description of what he calls their "very Somerset Maughamish
existence" revolving around colonial bungalows and clubs and their
patriarchal role. The planters also address the personal problems of the
workers and each estate is a mini-town with schools, shops and dispensaries.
The latter section of the book offers some quaint
historical nuggets: if you thought Americans only thought about coffee,
hear this, they invented tea-bags and iced tea. As Paul puts it, there's
"plenty of colour and romance" in the story-which suits most
of us to "T".
-Shuchi Sinha
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