Story of Tea Leaves

TC means Crushing, Tearing and Curling.  This is the three processes undergone by Tea Leaves.  This is the same tea which wakes you up in the morning.  In the Banks of Brahmaputra, in Assam, one could learn by visiting a tea factory, that growing tea and plucking the leaves on the top of the plants, is only an initial process. The aftermath processes are:

1. The plucked leaves are transported to the factory
2. They are spread on log trays where they are blow-dried.
3. The dried leaves are then sent to the next section where they are first crushed and then torn and curled.
4. Again, they are laid out once again flat on the floor to get oxidised.
5. Now the leaves turn a deep brown.
6. Next the crushed, torn, dried, curled and oxidized tea leaves are sent to machines.
7. The machines sleeve them according to size and grade.
8. Then they are sorted and packed off to tea auction houses where they are bought by traders.
9. The Traders add value to the Tea as per requirement before packaging them for retailers.

Rightly, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn often says:

1. Eat and drink mindfully
2. Walk mindfully,
3. Act mindfully and with gratitude.

Thus, we could visualize that all the labour, passion, energy, time, resources and costs ultimately end up in producing something.  Here we take things for granted like tea.  Tea is only one of the items we consume in a lifetime.  Here we see that there are various processes and parties like Nature and Human involvement in creating something.

Similarly, it is essential that we involve ourselves in various new and novel ideas and productive creations, which is useful to the humanity at large.