Between the beans

Ideally, I’d have preferred to read starbucked while sitting around in a Starbucks café, perhaps sipping a frappuccino, the Starbucks-invented mating of a frappe and a cappuccino. No such luck here in Delhi. Or, for that matter, anywhere in India because the ubiquitous coffee seller with its trademark mermaid logo does not have operations here. Pity. Journalist Taylor Clark’s well-researched, witty and largely objective account of how one company has been the vanguard of the gourmet coffee revolution in America and many parts of the world is probably best appreciated when you can see and feel the influence of Starbucks.

The growth of Starbucks has been phenomenal. When former housewares salesman Charles Schultz bought the small Starbucks chain in 1987, it had 11 stores. Today, it has $7.8 billion (Rs 31,200 crore) in revenues, 40 million customers a week and more than 15,000 stores. From a purely American phenomenon, Starbucks has now become a global brand—it has operations in 42 countries.

But the hugely successful coffee chain has also been the object of criticism. Clark, who met more than a hundred sources and spent countless hours reading the work of other authors, deals with five thorny issues related to the company. These are accusations that a) Starbucks drives local independent coffee houses and cafés out of business; b) the company exploits coffee growers in poor developing countries; c) generically coffee is bad for health; d) Starbucks exploits its employees and, finally, e) that Starbucks is homogenising the world by destroying cultural diversity. Apart from the fifth accusation, which Clark seems to subscribe to, Starbucked, by and large, attempts to disprove all of these charges, often quite convincingly. And, although his investigative journalism is to be lauded, it may seem that Starbucked lets the company off the hook pretty easily.

Yet, Clark’s prose never seems hagiographical. A 297-page tome that is practically only about one coffee chain surely cannot be a riveting read? But Starbucked is. The first half more than the second. Here, Clark traces the history of coffee and how it became a cultural phenomenon in America quite suddenly. He also explores curiosities—like why did Seattle become the epicentre of this fast-growing coffee culture and why doesn’t Starbucks have a significant rival? It is in the second part that things get a bit tiring—this is where Clark attempts to tackle the ethical issues that surround the coffee retailer. Contrast that with 1999’s seminal Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast who, in a 21-page chapter towards the end of his 458-pager, treats us to a quick account of Starbucks, its origins and heady growth. Of course, as well as doffing his hat to Pendergrast, in Clark’s account of Starbucks there is certainly a more contemporary brew albeit with an extra dollop of sweetened whipped cream as topping.

India’s century

As India’s Union Minister of Commerce, Kamal Nath occupies a unique perch from which to tell the unfolding India Story. In that sense, India’s Century is an opportunity lost. Of course, no one expects Nath to give a candid insight into policy making as it really happens, but the book’s problem is greater: despite its predictable title but an interesting strap (the Age of Entrepreneurship in the World’s Biggest Democracy), it goes all over.

It seems the author could not make up his mind about what he wanted his work to be: an autobiography or a story of our times. The book even reads like a long talk that Nath may be inclined to deliver to college students on a rainy afternoon. That’s actually a good thing for a book to have, except when it gets thin on substance and big on generalities.

The most interesting bits in it, not surprisingly, relate to global trade. Here, Nath does a better job of explaining the pulls and pressures that dominate world trade talks. Explaining why agriculture is a sensitive issue even for the developed economies, Nath says that “agriculture seems to represent the collective ego of the Western world”. Perhaps Nath should have just devoted the book to world trade dynamics. Depending on how he and his party fare in the general elections due next year, the Minister may yet get to do such a sequel.