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.