In Kerala there is a strange phenomenon among the consumers of recreational beverages - stranger even than frat boy parties and football matches - so unusual to the Western mindset is this phenomenon that 40, 30, even 20 years ago in the United States this would be the subject of the House UnAmerican Committee, a body of men so paranoid, self-deluded and outright weird that they once tried to let a suspect - the playwright Arthur Miller - of a hook baited with charges of treason if he were to allow the chairman to be photographed with Marilyn Monroe, his wife.
Just for the record, he refused.

At home I like to relax with a nice bottle of wine pack of beer several bottles of both rum & coke cup of coffee or three, and I may while away several happy, caffeinated minutes surfing the net or watching a film, or doing any of the relaxing, efffortless small pursuits one can enjoy while having nothing of any importance to distract me.
If I were a different type of person though, a hippy *spit!* ;) then things would be different, some would even say revolutionary, although these are types of people to watch out for usually ;)

For you see in Kerala, there is a very beatnik's dream: a coffee shop actually founded and run by the power of communism alone! (small `c` ;) )
On many streets in the admittedly few cities I've visited you will find a branch of the Indian Coffee House chain, run by the Indian Coffee Board Workers Co-operative Society (ICBWCS) although this, of course, is just one of those carefully crafted un-emotive titles these sort of lefties like to hide behind to mask their dastardly commie ways ;)
I like to think of them as the Communist Coffee Club (CCC), or maybe even Kommie Koffee of Kerala (and I think you get what I'm driving at ;) )

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I may be a little harsh here though, because they are very, very good in a number of ways. The service is fast and efficient, the food is great as long as you steer clear of the beef (small deep-fried scrapings of the `mechanically recovered` school of cookery i.e. lips and arse, and hoof and spinal cord, disguised in the only possible way they can be, through the magic of a deep fat fryer) and the prices are astonishingly low. 5 rupees for a coffee, 12 rupees for a tomato omelette, 8 rupees for a vegetable cutlet, 6 rupees for 3 poori - circular indian breads 6" across - and 8 rupees for a bowl of potato masala, a very nice boiled 'tatty & tomato stew served cold.

That much comes to 39 rupees, about 50 pence, and will fill you up even if you're a seriously hungry greedy bastard like I often am myself, or could easily constitute a whole day's eating for a normal person if spread out a bit. That's the kind of value that's hard to argue with - and the thing is, it's all really rather good.

So much for universal condemnation of the pinko leftie commies ;) :D