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.

Thankful for Medical Tourism

Yesterday was American Thanksgiving, and I was thankful for my ability to buy a better health care system. I was up bright and early at 5am to take the morning train to Dehradun to interview some farmers near there. Just before rushing out the door I ate some new bread I had bought at a bakery the day before. Just as I was about to stuff that second slice into my mouth, I noticed a disturbingly familiar itching on the roof of my mouth. Brighter lights and closer look illuminated the tiny bits of walnut they snuck into the wheat germ bread. Ack!! What to do? Fortunately, there was a taxi waiting outside to take me to the train, so I woke up a friend to ask where the best hospital was and redirected my confused taxi driver to a posh private hospital in south Delhi.

After an hour's drive that felt like days, I arrived at the emergency of Max Super Specialty Hospital. (They are part of the morally questionable medical tourism industry here. They'll even pick you up at the airport). It was the most empty emerg I have ever seen. I was greeted by a doctor who asked what happened, and then laid out on a stretcher while someone, who may have been a trained professional of some kind, took an exceedingly long time to get an IV needle into my right hand (remember, the left is for pooping only). He kept looking at me nervously every time he poked and prodded, trying to get the damn thing into my tiny vein. It was more than a little nauseating. Anyway, I made it clear to the doctor that I wasn't going to just calmly lay there and accept whatever they chose to inject into my veins, even in my shaky condition. So after some discussion, they pumped me full of the strongest anti-allergy medication ever. I broke out in a sweat and just about passed out. Still, my throat wasn't feeling normal after some time, so we had more discussion about whether they should give me epinephrin or some steroid from the prednisone family (I think prednisone should only be used in a near-death situation, which I guess this was). Ultimately, they decided on the steroid. I passed out for a while, and got discharged after the nurse decided I was going to live. I was somewhat less than reassured when she asked me which country I was from, and then asked if Canada was part of Australia.

All in all, though, not a bad hospital experience, as they go, and surely much better than it could have been! They sent me home with a bill for Rs1900 (just under $50) and a prescription for more antihistamines and some H2 blockers. That's right, ulcer/reflux medication. Why? Because I was feeling nauseated from the walnuts when I arrived. I'd never actually swallowed a walnut before, so I think it's reasonable to feel a little nauseated. That, and I was operating on 3 hours sleep. They do love their drugs here, so I smiled to myself, took their prescription, and when on my way..... a little groggy but very thankful to be alive.

Work? Oh yes, that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?

What with all the moving around and looking for a home, work got left behind last week. Now it’s back to the grind. I’ve found a translator/transcriber to help me with my interviews. Transcription of tape to text costs about half the Canadian price here, which is good considering all the hours of tape I have. I feel a little strange about outsourcing to India, but I guess since I’m living and working here right now, it’s not technically outsourcing. Anyway, it’s a slow process of setting up meetings and trying to make contact with people, but it’s coming along. I have to keep reminding myself of the Delhi Rule: Never, never try to do more than one thing in a single day. It doesn’t matter how small a task might seem to be, generally you can only expect to accomplish one per day. On the rare occasion you can do more than one thing, count it as a very special blessing.

In the meantime, I decided to check out the India International Trade Fair that’s on this week in Delhi. The theme this year is food processing, so I was naturally pretty excited about the whole thing. It’s a massive exhibition showing and selling everything from new machines for making extruded snack foods, to handloom weaving, makeup, tractors, and “as seen on TV” personal massagers, vegetable choppers, and exercise gadgets. And all of these things were mixed together in the exhibition halls with no apparent order to it all. Among the odd collection of things for sale were some fabulous textiles (I can never resist!), and a lot of information about the food processing industry. What was really fascinating to me was the sheer number of people. I know, I’ve spent enough time in India now that crowds, of all things, should never be a surprise to me. But, it’s a trade show, and it seems to be a major activity for the general public.

Homeless, but mobile, in Delhi....

My usual palatial home in Delhi, at my friend Lauren’s apartment, is full up with Lauren’s out of town friends this month, so I had to seek out other options. I arranged with a colleague from the Schumacher Centre for Development to stay at an apartment they keep for visitors, but discovered that the hot water geyser wasn’t hooked up (and you need hot water during Delhi winters), and it was a little dark and dingy. These things may have all been fixable, but the deal breaker was the strange man sleeping in the living room. He didn’t speak English, so I was a little confused, but it turns out he is the driver and sleeps there all the time. This was a little too much for me, so I decided to move on. I found a nice, clean, very cheap guest house in the Tibetan refugee colony of Majnu ka Tilla, north of the city centre. No kitchen, and it’s a bit far out, but there is a Metro station not too far away. It’s different out here, not like being in India in some ways. There’s a lot of poverty and not much good to eat, but thankfully less eve teasing (this is the new word I learned yesterday).

As for the Metro rides, they are amazing. It’s like nobody told India that the Metro is here. It’s like leaving Delhi and walking into a parallel universe. It’s clean, not crowded, safe, efficient, and fast. There are places fitting that description elsewhere, but they are in the world of the elite. The Metro is cheap – I pay Rs9 (less than 25 cents) to get halfway across town. Why isn’t everyone taking it? The only explanation I can think of it that the process of entering the shiny underground stations, using tokens or pass cards, and crossing the security barriers is foreign and intimidating for many people. It really is a different world than where the average person here lives. Maybe it will catch on with time, because it’s by far the best way to move around this city that I’ve seen.