In March 2020, India entered one of the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world. Within days, hundreds of millions of people were working — or trying to work — from their homes. The office was closed. The tapri downstairs was closed. The chai wallah who set up his stall at the gate of every office complex, IT park, and commercial district in India: closed.
For a country that had structured large portions of its professional day around the social ritual of chai, this was a genuine disruption. And in adapting to it, India's relationship with its national drink shifted in ways that have not fully reversed.
What the Office Chai Was
To understand what changed, it helps to understand what the office chai machine or chai wallah was actually doing.
In every Indian corporate office — from the glass towers of Gurugram's Cyber City to the mid-size software firms of Pune's Hinjewadi — chai was a managed social event. The chai break at 11 AM and 4 PM was not optional. It was the moment the team stopped, gathered in a cluster near the pantry or the building's ground-floor stall, and did the informal communication that formal meetings cannot.
Projects were unblocked over chai. Job offers were floated. Grievances aired. Romances began. The chai itself was often mediocre — office pantry CTC tea bags in lukewarm water from a dispenser — but the function was social, not gustatory.
When this disappeared in March 2020, something genuinely important went with it.
The Kitchen Becomes the Tapri
The first adaptation was simple: people started making more chai at home. Market data from the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods sector in India showed a significant spike in loose-leaf tea and premium chai masala sales during Q2 and Q3 of 2020, as reported by Nielsen India and Kantar's consumer panels at the time.
But the more interesting shift was qualitative. Freed from the institutional chai of the office pantry, people started making chai the way they actually wanted it. Stronger. More ginger. Cardamom. The recipe their mother used. The Kashmiri kahwa recipe they'd seen online. The saffron milk chai they'd only had on holiday in Rajasthan.
The lockdown kitchen became a place of experimentation, and chai was the most accessible ingredient available. You did not need to go to a specialty store or order anything online. You needed tea, spices, milk, and a saucepan — all present in virtually every Indian kitchen.
The Chai Meeting
By mid-2020, something new had appeared in the vocabulary of Indian remote work: the virtual chai meeting. Unlike a formal video call, it was informal — a Zoom or Teams call with a declared chai in hand, no agenda, the equivalent of wandering over to a colleague's desk. Muted when you sip. A brief, human reconnection.
Several Indian technology companies — Infosys, Wipro, and smaller startups — formally encouraged these unstructured calls in internal communications, recognising that the chai break was doing organisational work that the formal meeting structure could not replicate.
What Returned to Offices — and What Didn't
By 2022 and 2023, most Indian corporate offices had moved to hybrid models. The chai break returned, but changed. Office chai quality improved in many places — employers had noticed that people were making better chai at home, and that the pantry dispenser was not competing. Many offices brought in better equipment or contracted with chai vendors.
But the peak-chai-consumption moment of the day shifted for a significant proportion of the workforce. For the tens of millions of Indians who now work hybrid or fully remote — a number that remains substantially higher than pre-2020 levels, according to NASSCOM's workforce surveys — the morning chai is now always homemade, always exactly as you like it, and always drunk in a space that you control.
A More Intentional Cup
The most enduring change from five years of pandemic chai is this: a significant proportion of India's urban professional class now makes better chai than before 2020, because they had to learn.
The person who was previously dependent on the chai wallah's version now has opinions about ginger quantity. Has a preferred brand of CTC. Knows that adding cardamom at the start produces a different flavour than adding it at the end. This is new knowledge, acquired under strange circumstances, and it will not go away.
The pandemic gave India back its own kitchen. For many people, the first thing they did with it was make a better cup of chai than they had ever been served anywhere else.