Market Café

My office-au-lait

Anoothi Vishal / New Delhi April 12, 2008

Anoothi Vishal steps out to the neighbourhood café for a cup of coffee to find it's turned into a mobile workspace for laptop-toting professionals.

Jeet Thayil, poet and writer, might be alarmed at comparisons with Joanne Kathleen Rowling, though it would be impossible not to make at least some superficial ones. If the first of the Harry Potter books was famously completed in Edinburgh’s cafes, Thayil’s book of poems, These Errors are Correct, that appeared just last month, took shape in a small Barista café in New Delhi’s Khan Market, a place crammed with toilet-sized real estate with impossibly high rentals and kirana stores incongruously overflowing with expensive foreign goods.

When Thayil wrote his book, the Barista outlet was, as yet, a really tiny place (it has since relocated in the same market to a bigger outlet). The Café Coffee Day with its wireless Internet facility had, possibly, not yet arrived on the scene, neither had many others. And those serene first-floor diners that did exist possibly didn’t see the mad scramble for plug points and corner seats that they do today — in the age of “mobile offices”.

Writing in cafes may be a writerly, romantic thing to do. For haven’t we all dreamt of measuring out our own lives in coffee spoons (preferably in Dublin,but just so in Delhi), penning verse and sentences that will find resonance a century later?

But now, chances are that when you do inevitably stumble upon someone with an open laptop at places such as the Market Café in New Delhi, or the Indigo Deli in Mumbai or Koshy’s in Bangalore, s/he will not necessarily be engaged in some dreamy, creative pursuit.

Instead, all manner of enterprise seems to have spilled over into what has been till now essentially a leisure zone — at best, also used for informal meetings — and that cup of cappuccino, you may say, now supports a huge and growing workforce that cannot or will not be tethered to that piece of real estate that we all recognise as a formal office.

It feels like what one of those TV reporters we all love to lampoon would do — the ones who thrust a mike in your face and ask, “So how does it feel?” whether it is at a film function or a funeral. I feel just as intrusive as I climb up the rather steep, uncomfortable flight of stairs to the Market Café, photographer in tow, for a story that has been chasing us for a while now — staring us in our faces each time we step out for a latte or single-origin hot chocolate or even a cup of chamomile at a cha bar, and find at the next table a power point presentation, Skype or other voice chats over Internet and the exchange of resumes or marketing spiels.

The brief is to hang out at any of the popular cafes and interview people who are, in effect, using the space as their offices, sitting hours at a stretch, working away over a lot of coffee (“But hey! It’s better than drinking too much whisky,” the writer Thayil has suggested, himself the beneficiary of many complimentary cups during several months of writing, several hours every day). So here I am, tiptoeing up to several potential subjects with a tentative, “May I interrupt you...?”

Kirat Bhattal and Ria Pawar are young, good-looking and fairly glamorous. You could take them for two ladies-who-lunch who have strayed past their salad hour, chattering about their social lives. But that would be a mistake. Both are regulars, both put in a fair amount of work in these environs.

While Pawar is an entrepreneur — “I am starting my own NGO that will generate funds from auctions and retail sales and donate to other NGOs”— and a cookbook writer “writing on global cuisine for Indians”, Bhattal is even more surprising. She’s, well, an actress in Telugu films and uses this café, as well as others in Bangalore and elsewhere, to do things such as sending out portfolios or examining contracts among other things.

“I would otherwise have done these things at home,” she says, “but I like it here.” For Pawar, there are other attractions as well. The staff is friendly and there’s the comfort of being a regular not just here but at Mumbai’s Indigo Deli too that she also frequents. “The staff there brings over a slice of the berry cake as soon as I step in. And they always try to save some of it for me.”