Hi,
This is going to be a short newsletter, because I am still processing its subject: an incident from last week that left me flummoxed.
On Wednesday I was invited to meet someone who works with the philanthropic arm of a prominent Indian business group’s family office, which is investing in ways to tackle disability with a focus on mental illness. Until recently, my venue of choice for such meetings was one of several nearby Starbucks. But coffee doesn’t really inspire me. I’m more of a tea person.
Luckily, India has a bunch of newfangled ‘tea cafes’. These joints serve some excellent, pocket-friendly brews. Their smaller spaces, brighter colours, and fundamentally different customer profile make for a warmer, more relaxed vibe compared with the expensive latte-infused air of Starbucks.
Among the major tea startups, Chaayos is my favourite. Their ginger tea is fantastic. I find myself enthusiastically recommending their outlet in a mall in my area to anyone looking for a meeting spot. But on Wednesday, I discovered something that soured my mood.
It was a tray mat.
Specifically, it is their casual use of the word ‘mental’ that annoyed me.
To be fair, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen ‘mental’ misused in this way - to mean ‘crazy’, ‘bonkers’, ‘bananas’ - for the purposes of a tone-deaf commercial enterprise.
Just last year, India made mental health history when the makers of a mainstream Hindi movie were forced to abandon its title - Mental hai kya? (Are you mental?) - under concerted pressure from the country’s mental health community, including the Indian Psychiatric Society.
What rankles about the Chaayos tray mat was the irony of seeing it thrust before me during a meeting about, of all things, mental health. It was my first meeting with this person, and the venue was my choice. So its crude, lazy promo felt for me like a personal betrayal.
Given my current interest in mental health in the workplace, I wondered how employees of a company which resorts to such ill-considered language must feel if they ever want to open up about their mental health.
I took to Twitter to express my unhappiness, tagging the startup’s founder. He responded with a promise to get the issue "fixed", but I couldn’t be sure from his tweet about his own opinion. Was he okay with the language on the mat? Or did he condone my sentiment?
I was later told by others on my timeline that they had seen the same promotional mat before, in various other outlets. If it was indeed placed "erroneously" in my local joint, as the founder claimed, clearly the company hadn’t done enough, quickly enough, to put right the mistake.
Now that I’m watching closely, there’s much to notice at Chaayos. Admittedly, I didn’t pay much attention when the startup recently grabbed headlines for raising a mammoth $21.5m from investors. But then I remembered that barely months ago, the same company had drawn criticism for installing facial recognition technology in its cafes, throwing open prickly questions about the privacy of customer data. The tray mats made me wonder if there’s a behavioural pattern here.
I told Chaayos’s founder that I’ll go back to the cafe next week to check if the mats have been removed. Meanwhile, write to me if you’ve had a similar experience with a brand you love. If so, what did you do?
See you next week.
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