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Now you can bring home some street fun if endless bhars of cha and adda is your style of chilling out. Small terracotta cups with glazed treatment help make an environment-friendly style statement as well. Colourful drip-down effects on the rim will dissuade friends from smashing them to pieces, which adds to the fun of sipping sugary-sweet milk tea at road-side stalls.
They won?t miss the ritual too much though as you display accompanying clay accessories like tiny saucers and teapots, most of them the size of toys. The cups themselves are quite small, mostly without handles to make for an authentic experience.
These sophisticated versions of the humble matir bhar are made of a combination of silica and aluminia on a potter?s wheel. Usually, the cups are given a transparent glaze treatment on the inside and sometimes on the rim as well.
Some of the more attractive varieties are those with a glaze effect on the rim, usually dirty green in colour, which gives the impression of paint dripping. Post glazing they are baked in an oven at 750 degree celsius. The manufacturing procedure is delicate and 20 per cent of the stuff is rejected in the quality check stage.
| RACK RAIDER |
• What
Terracotta tea cups, saucers and pots
• Where
Legend and Akriti in City Centre, Swabhumi, Nimble Fingers exhibition in Caffeine
• How much
Rs 20 to 50 |
The remainder is ready for the racks, but some of the more non-bhar like cups are adorned with carved patterns. These are also the ones that are straight and have handles, as opposed to the plain ones that are small-bottomed and wide-rimmed.
And now with NGOs like Nimble Fingers taking terracotta to heart, there?s an avant-garde storm brewing in a humble clay cup. At their ongoing exhibition at Caffeine on Elgin Road, one can break away from the khullar-mode and pick up hexagonal and square cups or half saucers, that almost look like a half-moon, just that these are brown in colour! Some of the articles here are hand-painted as well and are a rage abroad. Matching tea and coffee pots complete the look.
The glaze treatment and the silica and aluminia composition make sure you can wash them after use. Most of them look so pretty though, you?d rarely think of taking them out of the showcase.
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