Tea is not just a drink but is more than that. Drinking tea in our country is more of a social act, an excuse to sit back and relax. For any north Indian, chai is sacrosanct. I am from a Pahadi family where chai is served several times a day, tea with breakfast, evening tea, bedtime tea, and many more other reasons to have it throughout the day. Maybe, this is the reason why I am so addicted to the kullad chai.
Know Why Kullad Chai is The Best:
“A cup of tea makes us feel better but a kullad chai makes us feel out of the world.” Well, I am totally agreed with this line. There is something magical about a Kullad Chai made on a roadside stall on a fog day. Nothing is better than experiencing a kullad of chai in good weather.
Kullad is basically a clay cup that taste and smell of earth, mixed with sweet milky tea. A kullad is a small terracotta cup usually unglazed. It is tiny cups which gives you the perfect warmth for those freezing mornings. The experience of having kullad chai is very tactile. The coarseness of the cup touching the lips and then a gulp of the additional sweet and milky tea as you sip. While having this tea, we use all the 5 senses especially if we make a slurping sound while drinking it. Experiencing it evokes a feeling of an era when time passed slowly and life was stress-free. The Chaiwalas tap the cups before serving the chai to remove the loose clay or dust particles. Nothing in this world can be compared with drinking chai from these clay cups
Today, you can still find tea being served in kullads at some small tea stalls, but largely it is being left behind by most of the urban settlers. Unluckily, they have been swapped with plastic cups or paper cups which come at a fraction of the cost and are easy to use and throw away.
I hope through this piece of blog, I can evoke the feeling of drinking kullad chai.