An old world institution, among the many others, that has fallen to the onslaught of online connectivity is the charming world of manual tea auction, of which the city was once a buzzing centre. Its closure has brought to an end the romantic world of tea tasters, brokers, producers, buyers engaged with each other under one roof in an auction procedure that had all the twists and turns of an edge-of-the-seat thriller.
Sidharth Goswami, an independent, and possibly one of the few freelance tea taster/blenders, and one who still operates as a merchant exporter in this changed scenario is a lone ranger from the old world. The trade that he joined as a young man in Kolkata and later moved to Kochi no longer exists. Gone are the days when he, as the nominated sole quality approver for different countries, assessed a variety of teas and cleared them. His blends fetched premium prices. He could match taste with demand, country with cuppage, and the fastidious tea world was eager to know his rating of a certain tea.
Today, the world of tea has lost this personal touch to swanky corporate style functioning. “Twenty five years ago a person working as a tea taster in a company required to know not only tasting and blending but also buying. That time tea buying most certainly was an art,” says Sidharth.
He recreates the atmospherics of the manual auction as theatre where the broker aimed to fetch the maximum price for a tea, while the buyer worked in clever ways to do exactly the opposite.
“These are extraordinary skills,” says Sidharth. He recalls the legends in the field - brokers and buyers - adulated by the rookies who joined the trade. Sidharth attributes his expertise to his training at DC Ghosh and Company, supposed to be one of the few brilliant training grounds for beginners. “We were called tea room assistants and our work ranged from writing valuation, blend sheets, reports after tasting, and purchase sheets in a catalogue. We had to check shipping documents, visit warehouses and learn packing, marking, sifting, loading and all such shipment-related matters. Quite a lot of it was clerical stuff but it took us down the alley,” says Sidharth. Tea garden visits too were mandatory and the taster had to learn from the basics of tea plucking to manufacture and tasting.
When the going was good and tea a major export commodity, Sidharth recalls going through hundreds of cups of tea in a day and making a blend that fetched the highest price. “This art is shrinking,” he rues.
A tea taster’s life he says has to be disciplined. It begins by keeping his tongue fresh and sharp, which means that he has to eschew spicy food, paan and spirits. “Cologne or perfume is a no-no.” But then Sidharth smiles and says that in the heydays this discipline came with a rider. As tea was the largest Forex earner in those times entertaining the foreign buyers required a fair amount of clubbing. “Holding a glass of whisky in your hand and keeping the boss’s wife pleased were imperatives. I was asked by my boss to do so,” he says breaking into guffaws. Today, this is totally non-existent.
The manual auction, with its unique open outcry system, was the event of the week. It would bring the tea fraternity on its toes. “It was like an exam; we used to be really tense. Signs of nervousness were clearly seen in the number of cigarettes that were smoked,” he says.
If one was to ask why the tea world has changed so drastically, Sidharth says that the rule number one earlier was the need for quality. It had now become only a matter of terms of payment.
“We were told to be extremely humble as a tea taster/ blender because when you are selling then there are only two rules, one that the buyer is always right and second is that even if you know the buyer is wrong, you have to refer to rule number one. We knew the art of not showing displeasure,” he says.
The reality of the day is that the tea fraternity hardly meets each other and sales are made online. Tasting goes on but the trade has lost its romance.
Coming from a humble background in Bengal, Sidharth worked his way up into this rather sophisticated social world of colonial procedure and style. A couple of incidents which clearly stand out in his career spanning forty years is of him rejecting a blend five times, made by a highly revered blender. Finally, when he was confronted to give reasons, Sidharth’s expertise was acknowledged by the stalwart!
He also rejected a request from Uzbekistan that each tea packet carry his picture and signature as the maker of a loved blend that he introduced there.
“These were some of the highpoints; people like me breathe tea,” he says.
