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One late night, alone with dirty kulhads, a scrubbed steel counter and traffic noise, I finally asked if a boy born in 2002 was meant to do exactly this.
For a long time, this place was just “our chai stall at Munshi Puliya”. In May 2025, after another late evening of washing kulhads, scrubbing the steel counter, and listening to the last few autos go by, I sat on the same bench where customers usually stood and asked myself: If I was born in 2002 for a reason, could this tapri be part of that purpose? That’s when the name “Chai 2002” clicked. Not as a branding trick, but as a promise between my birth year and this counter.
The struggle in that phase was mental more than physical: wondering whether to treat this as a temporary stall or to accept it as serious, long-term work. The hopeful shift came when I defined the mission clearly in my own head: to run a small but serious chai counter that turns everyday tea breaks into five-minute reset rituals, starting right here in Munshi Puliya with steam, kulhad, and cardamom as my tools.
Anil Kumar Sahu