Some Favourite Quotes from the Subcontinent

These things we cannot change. We can only observe.
(Principal Dhatt of Landour Language School, regarding the oppressive place of women in Indian society.)

Some of my best friends are Muslims.
(Dr. in Dharamsala.)

That is a tall man, a very very tall man. Very tall, very blond.
(Stranger walking behind Nathan and I at the India International Trade Fair in Delhi, November 17, 2007.)

Is Canada a democracy?
(Rickshaw driver in Delhi)

Canada. Oh, Canada, Australia, right? Oh, I don’t know much about geography.
(Nurse at Max Specialty Hospital, November 22, 2007, just after she inserted an IV needle into my arm.)

John! John! Stop hitting him while the foreigners are here! Wait until they’re gone!
(Liquor store employee in Kahn Market, Delhi, about a man who had been caught stealing a bottle of whisky.)

Oh look. Foreigners just walked in here.
(Man at table in Britannia Restaurant in Mumbai.)

No honey. You’re not foreign. They are.
(Woman in Mumbai restaurant, pointing to the whitey couple at the next table.)

Where are you from? Oh, America and Canada. Good countries. I’m glad you’re not from Israel. Very bad country.
(Taxi driver in Mumbai.)

Favourite Signs, etc.

Please allow us to frisk you for your safety.
(On the screen at the PVT Saket movie theatre in Delhi during the previews of Leonardo di Caprio’s film The Eleventh Hour.)

Not suitable for children.
(On the label of a sugar free ice cream.)

Gluttony Restaurant
(The Library Mall, Mussoorie)







My husband forgot to use his contraceptive last night. What should I do?
(I-pill advertisement on Mumbai commuter train - I added the bold, but not the italics)

A huge billboard advertising cardamom (all over Kerala).

Poster inside auto-rickshaw in Trivandrum: Two toddlers, one boy and one girl, each wearing jeans and a baseball hat. Both are topless, and they are kissing, under the words “True Love is True Hearts.”

Badonis Shop – We Know What You Need Best
(Landour, Mussoorie)

Best Things Seen on Modes of Transport

Two men and a goat on a motorcycle (outside Udaipur, Rajasthan).

Two men and a bicycle on a bicycle (on highway in Punjab).

Four goats in a basket on the back of a scooter (Trivandrum).

Nine mattresses on top of an auto-rickshaw, which was filled with pillows (Trivandrum).

About 25 flats of eggs and a man on a scooter (Trivandrum).

A real good rub-down

I finally made it to Kerala, and more importantly, I'm finally on vacation. I arrived here with my nasty chest cold still hanging on, so I figured I should take advantage of being in the birthplace of ayurveda and get some treatment. I went to see the doctor at Ayush Bhavan Ayurvedic Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram who gave me a mysterious collection of black tablets (which had to be CHEWED!) and brown liquids. Tasted horrific, but after 3 days of it I felt much much better. The more pleasant part of the treatment was a series of ayurvedic massages with specially prepared oils. These were unlike anything I have previously experienced. I went into the room with Aysha, the masseuse, and was told to strip naked. She then dressed me in what I can only describe as a loin cloth - a string around my waist with a strip of muslin hanging in the front, which Aysha pulled through my legs and tucked into the back of the string.* I sat down on a stool while she took some heated oil in her palms, seemed to pray over it, and then rubbed it into my scalp. Once the head massage was complete, I climbed onto a high, elaborately carved, wooden table. What felt like litres of warm, scented oils were poured onto me and rubbed over every part of my body (and do mean every part) in an intricate pattern. When I was finished, I had to be helped off the table because I was so slippery with oil.

What came next was perhaps the most memorable part. Aysha took me into the adjoining bathroom so I could wash off. This seemed reasonable; otherwise I probably would have broken bones just trying to get up the stairs, let alone home, because I was so slippery. What I hadn't realized, however, was that Aysha was going to bathe me. She dumped warm water over me, lathered up my hair, and soaped my whole body with her hands. She rinsed me well with buckets of warm water. It was a little awkward at first, but actually kind of nice. I guess this is part of the whole package. I couldn't relish it as much as I could have because I was trying so hard not to let any water get in my mouth and trying to keep the oil from running into my eyes. On top of that, all I could think about was the memory of walking through the Latin Quarter in New Orleans a few years ago and stumbling upon a "wash-your-own-girl" bar. I didn't go in to check that one out, but the idea kept coming back to me at the Ayur hospital. Somehow, though, I think I had the better experience of the two.

*On the second day, no loin cloth was offered. When I asked if she was going to put one on me, she flicked her hand and said "No" as if this was the most ridiculous thing I could have suggested.

Parsi Pulav

Mumbai is famous for its food, and although I was still sick and having trouble breathing, I wanted to get out and experience some of the local eats. So last Saturday, I dragged myself away from the comfort of the air conditioned hotel room and wandered the back streets well off the tourist track to find the Britannia Restaurant. I found this place thanks to my handy Rough Guide, which sometimes includes little gems not in the Lonely Planet (meaning they are not on the main backpacker trail). We were just about to give up when we saw this grubby sign with the painted letters nearly worn off. It looked more like a garage than a restaurant; the whole front was open, there was not much resembling décor, and it didn’t look like it had seen a paint brush since it opened in 1923. We were really hungry, and there wasn’t much sign of other options in the area, so we took our chances and went in.

The first sign we were in a good place was a voice from the table near the entrance saying “Hey look. Foreigners just walked in here!” Apparently this was a place known mainly to the locals. We sat down and an old Parsi man came to greet us. (Parsis are Zoroastrians who fled to India from Iran.) He had impeccable British English, and looked old enough to have been around during British rule. Nathan ordered something called a Chicken Sali, a chicken stew with crispy potato sticks, and I got the berry pulav – one of the dishes Britannia is famous for. It arrived and was FABULOUS. A mound of roasted vegetables buried in huge plate of perfectly cooked and sautéed rice was topped with crisp caramelized onions, cashews, and dried zereshk berries that are still directly imported from Iran. We were starving and in need of some really good soul food, and the Britannia didn’t disappoint.

The ambiance of the place was just as satisfying as the food. It was clearly a place that was all about the food and not at all about glitz or pretension. A bit dowdy, but clean. The napkins were printed with the outline of a chicken and the words “There is no greater love than the love of eating.” These were obviously my kind of people. The old man, who turned out (not surprisingly) to be the owner, kept coming by to make sure the food was ok. I was looking for something in my notebook when my food arrived, so I didn’t dive in right away. The old man, Mr. Kohinoor, promptly stopped me and told me to eat first and read later. His reputation was on the line if the food got cold and I didn’t like it! I thought I’d best listen to him, and he can rest assured that his reputation remains intact.

Dessert was in order, so Nathan got the caramel custard, another tasty Britannia specialty. I couldn’t resist the mishti dohi (literally: smoked curd), a Bengali delicacy that tastes a hell of a lot better than it sounds. It’s sweetened curd (yoghurt) made in a small earthen pot and smoked. You have to taste it to believe it. It’s hard to find outside of Bengal, but a friend in Delhi introduced me to it and thankfully showed me the best place in Delhi to get it. I now order it whenever I see it on the menu, which isn’t often enough. Anyway, Mr. Kohinoor seemed impressed that I knew what it was, and his mishti dohi was the best I’ve had.

Mr. Kohinoor kept stopping by for little chats, and often I was reading something when he did. Finally he came by the table, sat down, and said “You must be doing a PhD.” Just like that. To which I had to reply “Actually, yes I am.” He wanted to know where we were from, what we were doing in India, who we were. He told us the entire history of the restaurant, which was opened by his father who took out a 99-year lease on the place in 1923. He also answered my burning curiosity about Bombay Duck. I knew it wasn’t duck, but could never remember what exactly it was. They had it on the menu, so I asked. It’s a dish made of salted dried lizardfish that’s landed on the Bombay docks. He also told me – chuckling - about the American tourists who sometimes come, order Bombay duck, and then complain about the absence of duck on their plates. There was some discussion of the mysterious origins of why the fish is called duck, and a little more about politics and how he’d like to see some other leaders try to run a huge, relatively new country like India. In the end, he concluded that the world will be a whole lot better place when it’s run by women like me. I’m not so sure I’m the one to do it, but I think he might be on to something there.

Little Boxes of Love

I went to Mumbai in mid December partly to visit the Navdanya outlet there and partly to learn more about the Dabbawallas. The Dabbawallas are a caste of people from a village near Pune, a city not far from Mumbai. They have the formidable task of delivering home cooked lunches to office workers all over Mumbai. (The word Dabbawalla actually means “one who carries a box’”.) Thanks to these guys, most people in Mumbai don’t have to carry their lunch on the overcrowded commuter trains and don’t have to rely on expensive lunches or fast food. Commuters usually leave their homes at about 7am to get to work. At around 9am, the Dabbawalla will arrive at their house to pick up a tiffin (metal lunch box) packed with their lunch, usually cooked at home by the wife. Through a complicated relay involving at least 4 different people for each lunch, several bicycles, trains, and a lot of balancing on the head, this lunch gets to the office of its rightful owner at about noon, just in time for lunch. After lunch, the process goes in reverse as the tiffins are picked up from the offices and returned home before worker gets there. A lot of the time they are carried on huge trays balanced on the head of the Dabbawalla, who somehow fits himself into the local trains. Most of the Dabbawallas are illiterate, so they use a system of coloured symbols to identify where each tiffin should go. The most amazing thing is that every lunch gets to the right place every day. The Dabbawallas deliver about 200,000 tiffins throughout Mumbai every day, with almost no errors. They are so accurate that they have become an international phenomenon in the management world, and have been studied by everyone from Stanford Business School to The Economist.

The Dabbawallas have grown into a huge operation of 5000 people, all from the same poor caste and mostly from the same village. They have organized into Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust, which functions as an insurance policy for the men and their families. They are able to get low interest loans to keep them from being indebted to the local moneylenders and assistance with health care. The Dabbawallas have changed with the times as well. Traditionally, the meals were cooked by the housewife and delivered to her husband. Now, with changing families and workforce, about a quarter of the tiffins are delivered to women. With no wife at home to cook, many meals are prepared by mothers or grandmothers, even if they live in a different house. Bachelors and other people without a cook at home can even arrange a tiffin service; their tiffin is filled by another family. They can find someone from their own region of India who cooks the kind of food they like, and pay them to cook a lunch for them every day, which is delivered by the Dabbawallas. They even deliver home cooked meals from mom to a lot of schoolchildren.

After spending so much time in Delhi where fast food and instant meals seem to have infiltrated the local food culture so strongly, I was amazing to see this system still so prevalent in the huge modern city of Mumbai. Why were people still wanting home cooked meals in a country where packaged food and take-out has become a major status symbol? Why Mumbai and nowhere else? To answer my questions, I went straight to the source, Raghunath Medge, president of the Dabbawalla Trust. Mr. Medge, who has become somewhat of an international phenomena, spoke to me with the help of a translator. He promptly handed me a business card and a copy of a thick report on their operations. He’s used to this sort of thing by now – his group has been studied, he’s been to Prince Charles’ wedding, and he’s been to Torino, Italy for Terra Madre (the biannual gathering of the Slow Food Movement that I hope to attend this year). Turns out not only are people sticking with the system, their business is actually increasing.

Part of the success of the Dabbawallas is location, location, location. The extensive local train system in Mumbai is what allows them to function. Tiffins are picked in the neighbourhoods up by a man on a bicycle, who brings them to a central location for sorting, and they are divided among other Dabbawallas who take them downtown by train. No other city in India has sufficiently reliable transport system to allow such a process to work.

But, there has to be more than that. People obviously want home cooked meals. Mr. Medge told me that people just like the regularity of the system. They know their lunch will come every day. They know who has made it and what goes into it – the kind of oil used, the cooking methods, whether it’s veg, pure veg, or non-veg. Whoever is cooking it knows preferences, food habits, dietary restrictions for health concerns. Plus, people know this food is healthier than what they can get in a fast food place or on the street, and they can get variety. Even in offices with canteens, people still use tiffins because they don’t want to eat the same food every day. What was really interesting – and something that is so striking against North American thought – is that people like to get their tiffins because they know the food inside was made with care by someone they know, usually a family member. The Sweater Man from the Delhi-Mumbai train, after overhearing our conversation about Dabbawallas, started talking about his own use of the tiffin service. He liked that it kept him connected to his wife. She knows exactly what he likes and doesn’t like. She makes healthier food than he can get outside. And she cooks with love. Love. Can you imagine your average business man on the morning subway talking openly about the love his wife puts into making his lunch? He talked about the strong connection that is kept through the food. He finds the food tastes better if it’s made by someone he cares about, especially for him. He likes to know where his food has come from, what’s been done to it, and how it’s been prepared. If he is not feeling well and doesn’t eat all his food, his wife will know because the tiffin will arrive back home with leftovers.

For all the things I’ve seen that are indicate India is going the way of the fast food culture, I find things like this that remind me India is different. Food is important to people here in a way that just doesn’t happen in North America. People really care about it, and they care about what they eat. Partly I think it might be the strong family ties that still prevail in society, but there is something beyond that. Food is a big deal in Indian culture, and it’s hard to imagine that connection to food that I worry about so much completely disappearing here.

Trains, Planes and Phlegm

After much anticipation, I am back to the virtual world. I’ve spent much of the last few weeks being a combination of frantically busy and horribly sick. The Delhi air - cold, foggy, and really really dirty - finally got to me. My lungs remembered they were asthmatic and started to revolt. It all started after I started to get a burning feeling whenever breathing in, and then it just gradually increased until I became a huge walking ball of snot and phlegm. Just before leaving Delhi, I started ejecting some black goo from my lungs, which was a little disconcerting. By the time I got on the night train to Mumbai (Bombay) a few days later my lungs had produced more green stuff than I thought could possibly fit in there. I spent a long night on the train at the grubby sink in between the cars gasping for breath and vomiting gobs of green from my lungs. (This situation was not made any more pleasant by the two railway men a few feet away who were creepily and unabashedly staring at me while stroking each other’s thighs and leaning in to either whisper in one another’s ear or kiss each other softly. I thought at one point they were going to fornicate right there in front of me.) It was like I had to physically expel all the air I had breathed in while in Delhi as I left the city. This continued through a few days in Mumbai and the flight south to Kerala. Now, thanks to a little bit of rest and some entirely unappealing ayurvedic medicine, I am breathing a little better.

On the train, we sat across from a middle aged business man on the night train from Delhi to Mumbai and chatted in between fits of coughing and lung-puking. Let’s call him “Sweater Man” because he was wearing one of those slightly gaudy patterned acrylic sweaters popular with Indian men of a certain age. Sweater Man was basically a nice guy, but also very nosey and slightly irritating in a well-intentioned manner. As are most people who chat up the “foreigners” here, he was quite interested in knowing where we were from, why we were here, and what we thought about his country and particularly its food. He also had an opinion about what we should be doing and where we should go. When I told him I was doing agriculture research, he insisted that I need not got to Kerala, but instead should see Maharashtra (home to Mumbai and Sweater Man). All the places I had been so far were the wrong places if I really wanted to understand agriculture in India. Never mind that he didn’t actually know the focus of my research.

On the topic of food, Sweater Man seemed surprised and a little offended when I didn’t eat the railway meal brought to us – a white (and I do mean white) bread and mayonnaise sandwich and a stale samosa. “Don’t you like Indian food?” he asked incredulously. I said of course I did, but wasn’t so fond of this food that wasn’t fresh, and anyway, the sandwich was very much NOT Indian. A little later they brought out the “tea kit,” a thermos of hot water, a Taj Mahal tea bag (owned by Unliver), some refined white sugar, and non-dairy creamer powder. I used the hot water to make my own tea: organic green tulsi (holy basil) tea made by Organic India. “Did you bring all your food from Canada?” asked Sweater Man. I just kept my mouth shut and started to cough to avoid having to get into it. There is a strange and disturbing trend toward more processed, more western foods that is becoming accepted as “Indian” here. There are deep fried paneer (cheese) sandwiches on the airiest white bread you’ve ever seen, and more packaged sweet biscuits in the shops than you’d find on the shelves of a WalMart in middle America. The saving grace is that these things are so far still made with real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. It’s similar to what I noticed in South East Asia 5 years back – the worst aspects of western diets are what get picked up first.

I think Sweater Man’s comments were a cultural thing. People here just share their opinions, which are stated as facts, and don’t question whether you want to hear it or not. They just tell you exactly what they think. If you look like crap one day, they will tell you. If they really like you, they’ll tell you that too. It may be alarming at times, but at least you know where you stand. Studying the language back in October helped a lot of these things make more sense. I used to think people were just being bossy because they seemed to be always telling me what to do. “Sit here.” “Come.” “Eat.” Whatever. Turns out that in Hindi, the word please is considered to be part of the verb, so you just speak in the imperative. When you translate this, it sounds rude to us, but if you say please and thank you all the time to a Hindi speaker, they think you are being precious and making a big deal out of nothing. The principal of the Hindi school told us that when his Australian wife used to ask him to please make her a cup of tea, he would refuse because it sounded like she was asking such a huge favour. If she simply says, “Bring me some tea,” he doesn’t hesitate at all to do such a small thing for her. He has picked up some of her habit of saying please and thank you all the time, and now their friends make fun and call him Mr. Please-and-Thank-You.