The Gen Z idea of “tea”, gossip, drama, the unfiltered truth, has made us all rethink the word entirely.

But let’s be honest: the sheer excitement that rushes through a room when someone announces “tea’s coming” is probably something we carry in our DNA. It doesn’t matter if they mean a steaming cup or the latest scandal; our hearts lift a little either way.

And maybe that’s not a coincidence.

How we got hooked

Tea didn’t arrive in Bengal as a gift. It arrived as planned.

When the British East India Company realised it was bleeding silver paying China for tea, it hatched an alternative: to grow it right here, in the hills of Assam and Sylhet, with cheap labour and colonial land. By the mid-1800s, plantations stretched across the subcontinent, and an entire workforce, many of them brought from distant regions through contracts they couldn’t read, was bound to the gardens. The British didn’t just introduce tea to South Asia. They engineered a dependency: on the crop, on the labour, on the cup itself.

By the time independence came, the habit was already written into us. Three cups a day, milky and sweet, was no longer a British affectation, it was ours. The morning wasn’t the morning without it. Guests weren’t welcomed without it. Grief wasn’t sat with, nor joy celebrated, without a kettle going somewhere in the background.

We inherited the plantation. We inherited the ritual. We made both our own.

The real cost of a cup

Here is a thought worth sitting with the next time you wrap both hands around a warm mug:

A tea plucker in Bangladesh, almost always a woman, spends her day bent at the waist, fingers moving through leaves in the hill gardens of Sylhet, Moulvibazar, and Habiganj. She plucks around 20 to 25 kilograms of leaves per day to meet her quota. For this, she earns somewhere between 120 and 170 taka at current rates, less than two US dollars.

The tea she picks will be processed, packaged, branded, and sold. It will sit in colourful boxes in supermarkets. It will be ordered in cafés where a single cup costs more than her hourly wage.

And she will likely live in a slum, a labour colony on the estate, where her family has lived for generations, in homes owned by the garden, with access to services controlled by the garden. The plantation system the British built was never fully dismantled. For many workers, it simply changed management.

There are roughly 150,000 tea workers in Bangladesh, belonging to communities that have been on these estates for over a century and yet remain among the most economically and socially marginalised groups in the country. They often lack land ownership, face barriers to education, and have little political representation. Their wages have seen incremental increases over the years, but never enough to match inflation, never enough to lift a family out of precarity.

So here is the real tea, in every sense of the word: a drink this beloved, this embedded in our identity, this inescapable, deserves to be understood fully. Not just its taste, not just its history, but the hands behind every leaf and the lives those hands go home to.

Celebrate the cup. But know the cost. And let that knowledge steep.