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Between scrubbing the counter and checking logo drafts on my phone at the Munshi Puliya tapri, I watched this anonymous stall slowly turn into something called “Chai 2002”.
By October 2025, it was time to respect the work on paper the way we respected it on the counter. Between morning batches of chai and evening rushes at the Munshi Puliya tapri, I was reviewing logo drafts on my phone, discussing colours with designers while wiping chai rings off the steel surface, and answering calls from printers over the hiss of the boiling dekchi. Eventually, the “Chai 2002” name and mark went up on the board above the same old stall.
The struggle here was new: forms, permissions, decisions about fonts and layouts, all while still stirring chai and serving the office crowd and coaching students who had no idea these changes were happening in the background. The hopeful moment came the first evening I saw the new board glowing over the tapri and opened chai2002.com on my phone at the counter. It felt like proof that a boy born in 2002, who once wondered if anyone would stop at his stall, now had a mission and an identity strong enough to grow beyond this one corner of Munshi Puliya, without losing it.
Anil Kumar Sahu