The Virtue of Inefficiency

As I stood waiting outside a paan shop the other day for my monumental order (extended family) to be handed over, I was reminded of an incident a grand-uncle of mine often talks about. It happened when he was back in Bombay, fresh out of Harvard with a brand new MBA, and went to his neighbourhood paanwalla. As is traditional he waited and waited, but with the new-found perspective his education had given him, observed the enormously slow process of making a paan. He returned the following day and offered to optimize the paanwalla’s manufacturing: The paan tray has at least 20 little containers filled with a whole range of foodstuffs: Infinite varieties of paan, types of tobacco, the supari in pieces or ground, lime, cardamom, saffron, desiccated coconut, rose syrup, maraschino cherries and what have you. A simple intervention whereby all these are arranged in the order they go into the paan - making a basic assembly line- would, he opined, save upto half a minute per paan! He walked away from there, happy to have helped. But of course, the next time he went, the tray was its usual haywire self, and the paanwalla’s defence was telling: A paan simply doesn’t taste as good when you try to speed it up!

For someone fresh out of an American management programme this may have seemed counter intuitive, but all of us know that running a successful business of foodstuffs in Bombay, and even more so in Pune, is based on rather tricky principles.

This attitude flows through the veins of every self-respecting Puneite by the quart. Put simply, the inefficient rule the roost! Shopping experiences are meticulously engineered to be deathly struggles. If a certain food item is gaining in popularity and flying off the shelves, we promptly cut down its production to half. If queues of people are outside the door desperate for that one bite of goodness, we take immense pleasure in rolling the shutter down with a grand flourish and walking away. If a customer goes back home smiling, God forbid, we brand ourselves failures at retail.

Alas, the days of absolute inefficiency are a thing of the past, and the twenty first century is catching up, but slowly. Chitale bandhu has brought in automation: a modified machine originally designed to make strudels, imported from Austria or some such, churns out bakarwadis now. In the days of absolute inefficiency, these products had immense reputations spread far and wide, and made great gifts! When you gave someone in Bombay a whole box of Kayani’s shrewsbury biscuits, they would first swoon, only to come to and fall at your feet, and then shower you with costly gifts. Now, the boxes are available at (gasp) the railway station, and on board the Deccan queen even!

When available in plenty, food doesn’t taste half as good. If you have to wait three months to obtain a reservation in a restaurant, that’s as gourmet as it gets. If a restaurant chef is the eccentric kind and turns out just 15 entrees a day and no more, he is suddenly a gastronomic demi-god. Quality over efficiency: The uber famous Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne, in France, was reputed to be selective of not only its raw materials but also its customers. ‘Expansion’ is a swear word! Its true: would we feel special if we knew we were eating in one of the thirty-two branches of Vaishali in the city?

The next time you’re at a wedding or some large event and you spot a whole plateful of paans laid out, resist the temptation to obtain this easy pleasure! Go out, to the paanwalla with the largest crowd, jostle and push your way to the counter, and wait for an hour as your paan gets made with languid movements of the hands. The final 30 seconds in which you actually chew it, will be worth it all. Hopefully.

Régale Parsienne...

Oh the joys of Parsi food!!!!

My memories of "patra ni machchi" go back to the trips to Mahabaleshwar when in school to devour inhuman quantities of delicious Parsi food at "Belmont Park" - a lovely Parsi hotel on the out-skirts of the hill-station. Those were the days towards the end of that lovely time after which an invasion of our lovely bawa-infested hill station by droves of people from a particular state to the north-west of Maharashtra demanding "undhiyo" and "theplas" happened.

Sigh...Mutton-chops, patra-ni-machchi, sali-boti, sali-chicken .... and end it with a double or triple helping of coffee ice-cream and then laze around on the hammock reading comic-books all afternoon. The only motivation to get out of this slumber was to go for a walk in the evening to build up an appetite for the dinner.

During my days in Karad, Mahabaleshwar being a 2 hour bike ride away did help the cause. The Prospect hotel in Panchgani, the oldest hotel there proved to provide some delicious fare, with the typical all-you-can-eat lodging and boarding arrangements making life even more beautiful. The Grape-vine in the Mahabaleshwar Market - a teeny bit off the super-crowded-on-most-weekends tourist route, is a quaint place with lovely portions of Parsi food and a nicely decorated bar with teak and rosewood furniture. And fortunately for me, I had company of friends who loved the bawa-fare as much as me if not more to make the ride to Mahabaleshwar a pleasurable one too.

Trips to Bombay (would be too unfair to say Mumbai here) were aplenty. Aneesa and I tried every bawa restaurant within access while seeing to it that we were being fair to the other cuisines on offer. Jimmy boy at Horniman Circle, Paradise at Colaba Causeway and Britannia at Ballard Estate were the best of the bawa experiences. It would be unfair to leave out the kulfi at Parsi Dairy Farm at Hindu Colony, Dadar and on Princess Street and ice-cream sandwiches at Rustom's at Churchgate.




And what luck after that, a year and more to spend in Poona (note the anglicised version), in great company. George restaurant on East Street with its tempting rotisserie is a fantastic memory for more reasons than one. The Cheese Sandwich (with the thickest slice of cheddar in a sandwich I have seen in my life) at Vohuman Cafe next to Jehangir Hospital with the Cheese Omlette and Irani Chai can come close to being an excellent breakfast. The take-away biryani at Dorabjee stores on Moledina road with Mutton and Chicken cutlets have been the lunch during many-an-outing.

The climax to all this lies in a lovely place, which I unfortunately discovered towards the end of my days there. Destined to catch some great Parsi food for Navroze, Sheetal and I decided to hunt down what we could. On Dastur Meher Road in Camp, just off Main Street is a tiny place called Dorabjee & Sons (Restaurant). Riding on that street was like a time warp into what Parsi life in Poona must have been at the beginning of the century.

Photo credit:http://www.flickr.com/photos/thecookscottage/

Walking into the place, it was what you would expect from a Parsi restaurant - basic, clean and efficient. Plastic chairs and tables were the norm and the menu was a sheet with a basic list and was plastic coated.


The right side of the menu was the second-best part, after the food list. We ordered quantities that would suit two twp people who had first sighted civilization after a month long walk in the desert. Farcha, patra-ni-machchi, dhansak, sali-boti and then biryani. We washed it down with Fram's Raspberry soda. Dessert consisted of Caramel Custard (although more common and typical in Irani restaurants) AND Falooda. After all this food, bill-for-two did not cross Rs. 300 !!!!

What a way for the affair with Parsi food to come to a standstill. I spend my days in this country longing for it more than most other things... Sigh!!!

It is unfortunate but true that my understanding of Bengali hovers around the zero mark, notwithstanding whatever similarities linguists may claim between it and hindi/marathi. I was gently reminded of this on a recent visit to Oh! Calcutta, by the waiter who looked at me as if I were a curious-looking early life-form:
[ S: Can you tell me what a Bhapa Ilish is?
W: (Why do I get all the barbarian clods?) Sigh! It’s a Bengali fish preparation.
S: Yes I can imagine that, looking at its position in the ‘fish’ section, but how is it prepared?
W: (Jeez!) Its done in a traditional Ben-gal-i fashion.
S: Oh! ]
Condescending waiters apart, I loved my Bekti. (For some reason I had gone thinking it’s a tiny fish , but turned out to be, happily for me, pretty chunky.) I liked the hilsa. I loved the chutneys. And not that there is one, but if I had a daily quota of eating mustard, I would have exhausted a month’s due.

I also had, and liked, the railway mutton curry- Probably a case of good expectation management. In spite of its name lending it a romantic, olden-days ring, it has not enjoyed that great a reputation through the years. Gayatri Devi of Jaipur talks about it in her memoirs, when she traveled by train as a child: ‘We ate in the dining rooms, ordering what was called railway curry, designed to offend no palate… It therefore pleased nobody.’ And practical, too: basically, it is mild mutton rogan josh with vinegar, for long-haul journeys. This little addition, for some reason, makes the dish ‘Anglo-Indian’.

I’m prepared for next time though: On my next trip, I shall have a Bengali friend in tow, or a translational pocket-dictionary.

The First One

The love of food is a tricky concept to put your finger on. Just when you think you’ve got it cornered, you realize it pervades across age, it slinks across borders, it jumps from one continent to another (as can be confirmed by checking geographical locations of the blog writers). It has even been found in outer space! (Reports unconfirmed). It gets concentrated in some, and completely eludes the others. While usually a peaceful force, it has been known to be capable of driving men to violence (usually manifested in the throwing of dinner plates and other items of crockery). Whatever the nature of the love of food may be, I am thankful that I seem to have it in copious amounts, and can only wish for it to multiply.

While I’m at it, I’m also thankful for the following:

1) The twenty-first century: when food, and the ideas behind various kinds of food abound and grow. I sometimes shudder at the thought of having been born millions of years ago and being a hunter-gatherer, scavenging the forest floor for roots and tubers. Highly likely that the utter lack of taste-stimulation would have driven prehistoric me to hypothetical suicide.

2) I possess intact taste receptors, a palate without clefts, nerves capable of transmission and a brain capable of comprehending taste and smell. Without all these, this entire exercise would have not been real.

3) TV and the internet. (For more reasons than just food, but that’s the one relevant here.)

4) The invention of parenthesis.

This list could go on, of course, but I shall stop at this lest I am forced to change the name of this post from ‘the first one’ to ‘the only one’.

Right- so prerequisites in place, this is ready to take off. Hopefully, it will remain an active blog for some time at least, and not prompt an all-too-premature ciao/fare-well.