Day September 4, 2026

Seven seeds

Coffee is probably humanity’s favourite drink. As a storytelling ape species, we humans often attach stories to our beloved things, and coffee is no exception. Although coffee is not India’s ‘cup of tea’, it has a very fascinating history of its arrival in India, which I came to know while visiting a tiny hamlet in southern India.

Faded pages hold the guilt

Google will tell you that Mikania micrantha arrived in India in the 1940s. Old herbarium sheets, forgotten botanical books, and a trail of British surgeons, foresters, and explorers tell a different story — one with three separate points of entry, decades earlier than anyone thought.