Tea Shop
The idea of a break sometimes has its implications on the new mediatized way to communicate, that is on a whatsapp group. Four men who live in different parts of the city and are friends have a whatsapp group called ‘Tea Friends’. They all have an established business in the inner city of South Mumbai. Businesses such as stock broker, ready-made cloth showroom, building developer and some who are retired men but they look forward to meet everyday at a tea stall in Grant Road. Their day starts at around 9:00am when they leave their homes and commute to their workplaces but as soon as it is around 11:00 am, messages start popping up in their screens stating, ‘I have reached!’ and so on. They have motorcycles at their work places, which helps them to reach this place. Many groups similar to them gather at the tea-stall at their convenient times of the day.
The tea stall is on a busy street especially during morning and late afternoons. Vehicles such as taxis, motorcycles and hathgaadis get parked along the pavement, which has a steel railing along its periphery. The surface above the steel railing is where the tea gets served and these men spend hours in between their work routine standing and sometimes sitting on the motorcycles or the staircase of the ATM, talking about their everyday lives. Mobile phones become means to operate work from this space for some men. An ATM on side and a mobile repair shop on the other surround the tea stall. The building above these shops gets cantilevered by almost covering the part above the sidewalk, allowing diffused light to enter this space. The way they are dressed both in the clothes and the skin intimidates the shop owners, residents and passersby to not let them occupy this space.
This space helps them because these men have become friends over the years and since many of them do not work at these places anymore, allows them a feeling that they belong to somewhere. The idea behind gathering at such spaces is because work becomes monotonous and living has to deal with all kinds of duties and this place lets them forget about the many roles of life that they are intended to perform.
