This weekend I was really lazy and slept entire day. Finally in night, decided to have a long walk to downtown. Sometimes it is quite interesting to sit in a coffee shop nearby a street corner or inside a shopping mall. While enjoying a black coffee in a coffee shop, I have seen in the display several colorful leaflets about different type of coffee and also a description on the coffee expedition. I have collected some of it for leisure reading and got interested by the story of “seven beans” smuggling from Arabia to India. May be it was the first smuggling to India from Arab countries.

In the year 1000 A.D coffee cherries were first discovered by a goat herder named Kaldi in what is now known as Ethiopia and coffee was first commercially cultivated in Yemen. While its historic roots are still shrouded in legend, by the middle 15th century the people of Arabia were roasting and brewing coffee to enjoy a beverage much as we know it today. The word “Coffee” originates from the Arabic word “Qahwa” means that which prevents sleep.

While Arab traders were keen to ship boiled or parched seeds the entire world over, they were careful to never allow beans or cuttings that could create new coffee plants to leave Arabian borders…coffee had become so precious to Arabs, it was made illegal to export fertile beans. Anyhow, on pilgrimage to Mecca in the middle 1600s, Baba Budan, a revered holy man from India, discovered for himself the wonders of coffee. In his zeal to share what he’d found with his fellows at home, he smuggled seven coffee beans out of Arabia, wrapped around his belly. On his return home, he planted the beans in the hills of Mysore, India, and nurtured the young coffee bushes that resulted. Coffee flourished in the hills of India – hills now named after Baba Budan.

In short order, enterprising Dutch traders bought some of these coffee plants, and shipped them to faraway colonies in Indonesia and Ceylon. The Arabian monopoly of the coffee trade was over, and the Western world was waking up to a new aroma………………See the Indian smuggling helped all over the world now…..