[Episode 1] - The KCC Podcast That Never Was

Kolkata Chai Co has reached heights I would have never imagined. It has become a complete and terrifying dream come true. We know what happens to a dream deferred. It festers, stinks, explodes. But what happens to a dream come true? It’s equally scary and people tend to care way less. This year for me was about managing my “success” and dealing with its respective blows. Internal agonies of ego. Almost-famous-like scenes. It messes with your head. Shifts your goal posts. Foments unhappiness. It’s all happening, Penny Lane.

KCC was my idea, created sometime in 2018. It was a small idea — serving a good cup of chai to someone in Manhattan in a chic setting. Now it no longer belongs to me in the same way. I am only a part of it. KCC now belongs to our investors, our customers and our newest celebrity partner. With that divvying up of the pie and the subsequent (read: exponential) increase of the pie, every decision contains more weight. For the first couple years at our East Village cafe location, if I wanted to change something on the menu, it could change the next day, if not in a couple hours. Now, I feel myself mired in the committees of our cafe teams, incessant taste testings and worse, my own hesitation - is this good enough to be on the KCC menu? Can this scale across all locations and be a consistent product? I move slower and break less things.

KCC is now a big idea, too. We have increased the categorical size of “chai tea” in the United States. I don’t have Nielsen-level data for this just yet, but I’m pretty sure. We’re still a relatively small company but we oscillate between #5-#6 on Amazon’s top chai brands. We are taking on legacy companies who have appropriated and profited for too long in a sleepy category relegated to the bottom of grocery shelves. They don’t like that. America is a Land of Opportunity but it is also the Land of Litigation. I spent more on lawyers this year than I’d like to admit.

KCC is now other another person’s idea, too. Every now and then someone will DM me something on Instagram of a direct rip-off of a KCC concept. My most skeptical close friend has visited his local Farmer’s Market in Brooklyn for years. This year he noticed a chai stand there and quietly told me, “I think you did that.”

While I do believe we should have more chai companies and authentic South Asian food companies, I think the bar for creativity and originality needs to be higher. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but yes, it’s also annoying.

So where do I turn when dealing with how burdensome success has been? Radiohead! Have you ever watched Meeting People is Easy? It’s a claustrophobic documentary detailing Radiohead’s tour after their seminal global hit album, OK Computer. I never thought being a rockstar could be so horrific. See what Colin Greenwood prescribes:

'I think, as long as you keep moving, you're all right,' he said. 'The thing is you're always developing and expanding. It's a protean thing and a public image can't keep pace with it. So it - the process of success - is like this slow-drying glue that sets around you, that slows you down and gums you up. And while all that's happening, your own life's going on at the side of it, with your own relationships and your own experiences and that becomes sort of calcified as well. And the whole thing just grinds to a halt really. And then you suddenly find yourself in the paper or on the cover of a magazine and your life and experiences have become summarised. And once its summarised, its over. So the trick is to try to be in the corner of people's vision, but not full on.'

That’s kind of it, right? Phew, for a minute, I lost myself. Go back to the archives. Find the core raison d'être. Bring[ing] it All Back Home.

Back to the podcast. If you thought KCC was some industry plant, who is continuously selling out, now bigger and better with the funny man Hasan Minhaj, you get to hear me and Ani try to understand a predatory small business loan and my best “Ira Glass ah” podcasting voice. Enjoy the moments! As Marvin Gaye says, “there’s a lot of truth in it, babe”.

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Transcript: [this transcription may contain errors]

It's my second day here in Kolkata. I'm sitting with my aunt, and she's eating a fairly sad piece of toast, and some tea.

In December 2018, I ventured to India to find out more about tea. I started a chai company, Kolkata Chai Company, a tribute to the city where my parents came from, and one that I was very familiar with as a child. It started as a small farmers market venture, a way for me to see if people actually appreciated Chai the old fashioned way, you know, made it in a pot with loose leaf tea and spices.

It's soon billowed to food festivals with quest love, doing a pop up residency at the Todd Snyder store in Madison Square Park, and even creating our own pop up cafe for a day in Brooklyn. So in December, I planned a trip to get to the root of this product, one that I had known very well while growing up, but now was seeing through a whole new lens.

Welcome to the Kolkata Chai Co podcast. Come in. Take a seat. Bring your cup of tea as you go through the unraveling tale of a couple of kids who wanted to start a chai cafe in New York City and the trials and tribulations they face while doing it, it's part startup story, part cultural inquiry, an honest take on entrepreneurship and the hundreds of decisions it takes to serve a simple cup of tea.

Our first episode focuses on the decision to open a cafe and Ayan myself taking a research trip to Kolkata and the tea gardens of West Bengal.

“20, 30k 4% up front. Fee for what amount is taken, will given in a check. 12 month term. 12 month term”

That's me and my brother Ani, discussing some loan options for the cafe. Ani is my business partner, my brother and possibly my best friend and my worst enemy at the same time. We don't always agree on stuff, but in some biblical way, we make up for what the other lacks and when it works. It's really beautiful.

By the way, a 12 month term on a loan means that you have to pay the entire thing, plus interest back in 12 months. For us, that meant the money had to be paid back before our cafe was even open while we were under construction. So it didn't make sense for us. But let's take a step back and first ask the question of, why are you opening a cafe?

What you actually want? Like, is this something that you actually want? That's

my friend Jasmine, who I recorded at a pizza bar when we were discussing our respective futures.
”Or is this some products of maybe, like, boredom or feeling uninspired, or like, it just feels like it's the next step, right? Like, it's kind of like you're like, getting married, right? It's like, did you actually want to get married?”

“Well, I think a lot of people get married for the wrong reasons".”

“I'm saying, like, are you getting KCC? Are you opening up KCC? Because you feel like, okay, like, I don't really know, like, what it what else to do, because this is what the market Yeah, I know, but that's what my question is. Is this what you want though”

“It doesn't matter what I want though it's like, this is like the millennial thing, where it's like, don't do what you're don't do what you want to do, do what you're good at. I think this is a 10 not like that for KCC, this is a ten million brand. If you don't believe that, then, you know, get out. Get out.”

"Okay, okay, okay, helping excuses for my arrogance here, but there's a bigger idea that I was trying to get to in this conversation, and it's what people in Silicon Valley call product market fit. Now all that means is that you have found an ideal offering for a group of consumers, and now all you have to do is scale, scale, scale. Both Ani and I had been creative and entrepreneurial for over 10 years at this point, and trust me when I say we've tried everything under the sun. After experimenting and failing in so many ventures, you tend to know what works and what doesn't work. And we'd never seen anything like Kolkata Chai Co before. The timing was right. We were the right people to do it. We ran the numbers and deemed we could have a profitable shop in about six to 12 months, if we played our cards right. More importantly, though, I think there's gut feeling, and it's weird recording this before we've opened and still not really knowing if we're gonna be successful or not. But there's this gut feeling of this is important, this is timely, and if you let fear and all these other risks, real risks ruin our chances. We're always going to regret it. So we jumped we had our numbers, we did our research, But we jumped.

I arrived in Kolkata on a cool evening night. The airport is always a place of joy and heartbreak for us. Every time as a kid, we'd get off the plane and be overwhelmed when we saw our aunts and grandparents patiently waiting for us outside, sometimes for hours. When it was time to leave, the feeling was the exact opposite, heading back from a second home, not knowing when. You'd see your family again, but right now I'm sitting eating breakfast while my grandfather roasts to me about being a so called Tea connoisseur.

“You in the Barcelona, tea with the tea from Barcelona. Look at the color. Look at the gold flowing. Look at the gold flowing for the minds, the heart and the wife. Look at the gold flowing”

somewhere. This was after I boldly attempted to do a tea tasting with my family, with the tea bot from the famous Mahabodhi tea shop near Haza road. They had sold me some pretty expensive Darjeeling teas, and my grandfather was not impressed. He got us from a small shop down the street a broken variety, and he rarely questioned the quality. But this is what tea culture is like in India. It's a commodity. The tea on the street is dirt cheap, made to fulfill a country of obsessive tea drinkers. Indians drink 30% of all global tea output. It's available everywhere in Kolkata. It keeps the city in pace with people stopping for tea at points throughout the day, and that's what I love about it. I love the fact that you can get a cup on the street for seven cents and then also paid $3 at a fancy Cafe on Park Street. Tea sort of floats above class, economic and social status with its ubiquity, but when you dig a little deeper, you realize how its production and consumption intersects with our global supply chains, the effects of colonization, both in India and abroad, and how serious global warming and the other threats to our environment really are, but more on that later. The next episode, we dive into the multitudes of chai as I walk around Kolkata drinking pretty much everything, and begin my trip to Darjeeling and beyond. Thank you for listening

I'd like to thank myself for recording the podcast, editing

it, choosing the music my brother or young AMI and yo, my parents cried when I showed this draft. So I think that means something. We're on the right track. See you next time.