Maanav Tea Co.

We are located way up on the 17th floor of the Chatterjee International Center at 33A Jawaharlal Nehru Road. Room No. 11 is our little corner of the building. Being that high up means we get a pretty good view of the city, though we’re usually too busy with the tea business to look out the window much. Maanav Tea Co. has been operating out of this room for a while. It’s a typical office building setup—waiting for elevators, saying hello to the security guards, and dealing with the central air conditioning that sometimes has a mind of its own. We deal with various grades of tea, mostly focusing on wholesale. The office is packed with files, tea tasting cups, and a lot of notebooks where we keep track of prices. It’s not a large space, so things can feel a bit cramped when we have visitors or when too many samples arrive at once. We don’t go in for fancy decorations; we just have what we need to get the work done. Dealing with tea in a high-rise building feels a bit strange sometimes, especially when you think about where the tea actually grows, but this is where the business happens. We spend our days on the phone or typing out emails to vendors. It’s a busy environment, but we’ve made this little room on the 17th floor work for us over the years. We just keep our heads down and focus on the tea.