Tea shop at Munnar

Keralites have a strong affinity towards tea. Travel along the roads of this tiny state; be it villages or cities, you can find numerous tea shops dotting the waysides. These shops range from mere tea shops to three meals serving ones. The video is of a typical Kerala tea shop (Chaayakada in Malayalam) in Munnar, the famed hill station.

In villages tea shops are a meeting place of the local men where they read the day’s newspapers. National and international politics are discussed and debated here, thanks to the high literacy of the state.

A popular joke about Keralites is that when Neil Armstrong landed in moon he was welcomed by a Keralite tea shop owner. Exaggeration at its best; but its more like a metaphor of the entrepreneurship of the people of this state. Kerala has a large number of expatriate population and the preferred occupation of many of the first generation expatriates was a tea shop business.