Coffee came to India in mid-seventeenth century. Legend says Baba Budan, a Sufi saint, tasted this drink, Qahwa, on his pilgrimage to Mecca. As he sailed home from the port city of Mocha in Yemen, he smuggled seven beans of coffee, strapped to his chest—for Yemenis were extremely protective of their coffee industry. He planted these in the backyard of his hermitage at Chikmagalur in Karnataka. Coffee plants spread onto the surrounding hills known as Baba Budan hills and grew wildly for centuries. Dutch attempted to develop coffee plantations in India, but it was British who relentlessly drove Arabica coffee plantations in the hills of southern India. A Coffee garden in Chikmagalur Coffee, thus arrived in India about five hundred years ago, piggy-backing on a holy enterprise. But it has yet not reached north India. Coffee that is drunk - if at all - in the north, is not coffee but a preposterous imitation of it; the instant coffee. This according to Vir Sanghvi ‘is to genuine coffee

  Printed word cast its magic early. I went to it like the children of Hamelin in thrall of Pied Piper’s lute.   In my school years, I mostly read Hindi. I read magazines, comics, and abridged, translated versions of English classics. English books were a luxury we could ill afford. Public libraries thrived in India of seventies and eighties and I hung on them for life.   We moved to Bangalore when I finished eighth level in school. In those days, more than forty years ago, each residential hamlet in Bangalore had a public library known as City Central Library. Library in our locality, was quartered in a four-bedroom house. Librarian sat in the small hall at the entrance with his chest of drawers which contained records of the borrowed books. Living room, the dining room, and the bedrooms had tall racks lining every wall, choc-a-block full of books. There was a reading table with a few chairs in the dining room, perhaps the dining table of the house. Books were everywhere. Smell of

  I spent fourteen months in Afghanistan, two years after the fall of Taliban in 2001. Colours of these memories are still sharp and Afghanistan never feels far. It isn’t actually; Kabul is 990 km from Delhi, Mumbai is 1410.  Events of the last two weeks ceaselessly churn these impressions and a medley of disparate images flashes across the inner eye, every now and then. Rush of memory defies chronology even as I try hard to discipline the unruly surge, in an attempt to capture some in words.    It was a strange world I entered on that cold day on the 1 st   of December in 2003. Kabul looked fetching from air; a valley surrounded by low mountains and the city timidly creeping on to the slopes of the surrounding hills. On ground, it was far from beautiful. Airport was small, noisy, and cluttered. Tall, swarthy, bearded men - wrapped in thick blankets, many with Kalashnikovs slung on shoulders or the barrel menacingly poking from beneath the folds of the shawl – were everywhere.