The Indians we encountered all seem to take an early morning meal that's a kind of pre-breakfast, with just a few biscuits (I grew up calling these "crackers") and tea. Later in the morning comes a bigger breakfast.
Typically the tea at the first meal is CTC with milk, often hot milk: basically, it's fuel to get you going. At the Soongachi bungalow, though, it was different. The tea was CTC, all right, but it was clear that we were going to *taste* it. No milk, and what startled me the first morning, no cups: we drank the tea from glass tumblers of the kind you would use for good whisky. The tea wasn't dark, either, but an amber that came from not trying to cook all the color out of the granules. (Sorry, I forgot to ask how long it had steeped.) It was a pretty color, I must say, especially when held up to the morning light.
I didn't think to ask SMC if this is the way he usually drinks the first tea of the morning, or if he was trying to convince my wife and me that CTC tea can actually taste good. If it was the latter, he certainly succeeded; the liquor was mellow, with just enough bite for the sake of balance.
So that is how my CTC snobbery died. I have some CTC teas from Soongachi and New Glencoe that I'm going to give some close attention once I'm done with the more fragile teas we got later in the trip.
/Lew