Drip machine

What I told myself in September, when I "saw" the U.S for the first time --

1) Great country.

2) Doesn't know the first thing about coffee.

It was true. Their "French Roast" was quinine, only more expensive. Their "bold Colombian" boldly excited all the wrong tastebuds. And I couldn't begin understand how anyone could drink those infinitely bitter espressos, those concoctions of pure decoction. To a tongue weaned on Nescafe/Bru/Adigas philter coffee, all these Amriki coffees tasted... bad. In fact, my dislike was intense enough that I had begun to idly compare India to America on the basis of their respective coffee making skills; needless to say, India was coming out on top.

But coffee-wise my tastes have about-turned, thanks to a few months of Starbucks and JP's Java. I have gone from reviling American coffee to grudgingly acknowledging its merits in the wake-me-up department to extolling its virtues to other Bru-fans, all in about two months. In fact, it's come far enough that people have begun to look at me askance. Even before I left India, my shorts-wearing hair-growing rock-listening guitar-playing American-book reading tendencies were being subjected to some mild censure and being attributed to the "western-influence" endemic to urban adolescents in India, and now that I have gone so far as to change my taste in coffee, my people give me looks of resigned vindication. They say-your subjugation is complete.

All I can tell them in reassurance is that I don't like baseball more than I don't like cricket, and burgers will never replace rasam and curds with rice.