Sunday, June 3, 2012

Travelogue: 'What's behind a cup of Tea?' or 'The Munnar Motorcycle diary'


Two days is a minuscule part considering the span of life, One can either attain the highest state of philosophical enlightenment or long for a bowl of soup - totally depending on his/her hunger level. But if one decides to let loose the prejudices and hit the road, they will encounter one such experience like this. One would be capturing images in their eyes rather than on a camera. One would prefer strangers over i-pods, and nature over material possession.

Two of such kind of people set out for the trip on a brisk April day and came back with indelible memories. Of sights of rolling tea-plantation covered slopes, of sounds of chirping of distant bird, of aroma of thin mountain air.
The destination was Munnar, the amazing tea county in South Indian state of Kerala. The mode of travel would be the "La Poderosa" 220cc Bajaj Avenger motorcycle, a class apart when it comes to mountain climbing.


To get into Munnar from Coimbatore one has to pass through couple of virgin Nature parks (Chinnar wildlife sanctuary and Indira Gandhi nature park). We were reduced to a mere speck in the dense forest cover. The nature was at its sprawling best with its trees, rocks and the distant streams. The road-signs warned us of elephant crossings and informed us the elephants have the right of the way. Once near Maraiyur (a tribal village deep inside the forest), a thin man with protruding cheek-bones stopped us and warned that an elephant is standing on the middle of the road on the next turn. I slowed the speed of 'La Poderosa' to a near crawl and took the turn. A giant Indian elephant was standing on the roadside. With it flapping ears and a fixed gaze, it was indeed a sight. Without intimidating the giant beast with the sound of the motorbike engine, We whizzed past it in one of those 'Man vs wild' moments.


Maraiyur presented us with the first sights of a Keral'ite lifestyle. The coconut trees, the toddy shops, the men clad in mundu (a regional dress) and women in their white sarees and oiled hair, the communist flags and occasional portraits of Stalin and Karl Marx, the shoddy roads and above all else the Slanting rays of sun.

After Maraiyur starts the ascent which for the first few miles is similar to the ascent we had in Chinnar wildlife sanctuary except that the road here is worse. But once we enter the leeward side of the mountain the sight suddenly changes. The beautiful tea plantations starts to appear and we were soon transformed into the fairy-tale land. The greens were everywhere, rolling like a carpet spread over the landscape. There were more greens with every turn that we took and each sight was more pleasing than the previous. We stopped a couple of times for taking photographs, but soon realized that landscape is getting more picturesque and continued to ride. This particular part of the stretch of trip towards Munnar will go down as the most beautiful and aesthetic drive I have ever had in my motorcycle. At some places we walked down a few meters down into the sloping tea plantations and brushed with the greens of tea leaves.

Munnar is sleepy little town (but for its tourists) hammocked by Western ghats on all sides. One can make out that people of this town make their living out of two T's - Tourism and Tea.
The Tea industry here is mainly run two major corporate firms ,with boards announcing the boundary of each in what a few centuries before was a vast Shola grassland (before the British came) . We took a while to get into one of the tea plantations near Mattupatty dam in Munnar. We stopped there to view the magnificient lake formed by the dam in the bowl of mountains, but were soon to the point of attention among the tea plantation workers owing mainly due to my foreigner friend and partly due to my 'la Poderosa' motorcycle.

On talking with the workers, we understood that most of them are migrants from Tamil Nadu (which made the communication all the more easier since I know and speak Tamil) and they have been working in tea-plantations in Munnar for generations. They told us on how so many companies were existing before and how it is now reduced to only two main corporate firms doing tea-business now in Munnar. They told how the welfare measures got cut and was reduced to near zero with emergence of corporate bi-poly.

These workers are given a target of plucking a minimum of 25kgs of tea per day and for that they are paid a paltry wage of Rs.150 per day. This meager sum of wage amounts to as little as 3USD a day. and this is their only source of income.

The other phenomenon we understood is that most of the laborers in tea-plantation are women, while most of their husbands were engaged in tourism industry. The corporate firms prefer women workers over men due to the absence of trade-unionism over women working class in this parts of India. The family income totals to as little as 5-10USD a day.
As one of the worker was telling this situation to us, we were surrounded by more workers who shared the same plight. They told us that a deal exists between the two firms on keeping the labor wages to minimum.

Since tea is a labor-intensive industry, it takes a lot to retain a laborer. The reason why many small firms of the past were reduced to bankruptcy is due to the dearth of labor availability. The two big firms, in those days, had wooed all the laborers towards their stable by giving big pay in the beginning. Soon, there were only two players in tea-industry in Munnar and all the others were wiped out.
After setting their ground firm, the two majors stared pitching against each other which ended in a major loss of profits to both the firms (by increasing the wages to laborers), then both the firms decided to keep a minimum wage as standard across the industry which is barely minimum to sustain a meaningful life. They face no competition, as they have already wiped all the other firms out of the race.

The son and daughters of these workers cannot get meaningful education. They were sent to work as child labors in tea-shops or souvenir sellers. Life is not easy in beautiful places.

The real pain behind a cup of tea, I understood in the most picturesque of places. In the drive downhill and through the rest of my journey, its the face of the tea-plantation workers which flashed again and again in my memory.