My Bachelar and Coffee Days in Regal Standard

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A circulating video suddenly carried me back to my young bachelor days in Delhi.

In those days, one of our little luxuries was coffee at the Standard Restaurant near Regal Cinema in Connaught Place. It was considered a rather sophisticated meeting place, frequented mostly by educated young professionals like us.

Coffee with one biscuit cost just ₹1, later rising to the shocking price of ₹1.25! With our modest salaries, even that was a treat to be enjoyed, not taken for granted.

The great attraction was the jukebox, loaded with the latest Bollywood songs. Naturally, we were reluctant to waste our precious rupee coins on music. Occasionally, some rich and carefree fellow would feed the jukebox generously and we would happily sit there enjoying his generosity!

Then there was the famous Cellar disco. That belonged to another world. You practically needed a girlfriend to enter, and in our generation having a girlfriend openly was almost a social taboo. So we respectable bachelors remained outside, while foreigners and Delhi’s fashionable elite enjoyed the Cellar.

We had our coffee, our single biscuit and someone else’s jukebox music and somehow we were perfectly happy.

Those were the days when pleasures were small, money was scarce, and memories became priceless.