Pertinent Observations

Last year, before we traveled to Turkey, I had carefully written out a covering letter along with all our documents and sent it across to the consulate. However, after it turned out that there might be some problems with the application (since I wasn’t working, and Priyanka wasn’t getting a leave letter), the agent decided to re-word the application.

In general, whenever I’m writing something, I’m very careful about the spellings and grammar. I make it a point to write well and make sure there’s no room for ambiguity. However, considering that the following letter was actually successful in getting me a visa, such care and precision is perhaps not required. Here is the letter that the agent wrote on my behalf as part of my visa application.

*******************

To

The Consul General
Consulate General of Turkey
Mumbai

Dear Sir

I am Management Consultant (freelance) is enclosing herewith my visa application along with visa application of my wife Mrs. Bharadwaj Priyanka Venkatesh, dully filled in and signed by us for necessary tourist visa.

We are planning a holiday visit to Turkey during the visit we will stay at hotel ALTINOZ, Ragip Uner Cad. from 23rd till 26 Oct 2011 and at hotel Best Western Mimar Mehmet Aga, Caddesi No.17/19, Sultanahmet, Istanbul from 26 Oct till 29 Oct 2011. The Hotel confirmation and other relevant documents are attached herewith for your reference. Hence I request you to kindly grant us necessary tourist visa at your earliest and oblige

Thanking You

Yours Faithfully

Shashidhar Karthik

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I’ve typed out the letter here exactly as the agent had written it out to the consulate (he had given me a copy). While I’m sad that such a horribly written out letter had to go out in my name, I’m at least glad that I managed to get the visa to Turkey well in time and without any hassles.

At the outset I want to mention that I mean no disrespect for my schoolmates or teachers from Sri Aurobindo Memorial School, where I spent twelve mostly wonderful years. It is just a thought as to whether it would have helped me later on in life had I been shifted out of there when I was in say primary school into what I would call as a “high performance school”.  Also, apologies at the outset if I were to sound boastful in this post. Unfortunately, there is no other way to get the point across.

Right from primary school, like say when I was in first standard, I was what can be described as a “high performer”. Yes, I was always first or second in class in terms of marks, but that is not so much of the issue here – there were a lot of people who did nearly as well and my marks were not so much of a differentiator. I’m talking more about being almost always significantly ahead of class.

For example, in first standard, they taught us addition in school. I remember being taught to do something like “two in the mind, four in the hand” and then count out the two in order to add two and four. By that time, however, I had already learnt addition at home and was pretty good at it. When called to the front of the class to solve one such problem for everyone, I just shouted the answer and ran back to my seat. I remember the teacher saying in a subsequent class that she would give me a “big sum” (which was 3-digit addition), and I solved that too in a jiffy.

Again in first standard, there was a spelling test. In all earlier such tests, I had done exceedingly well, getting only one or two words wrong at the max. I think by then I had already begun to read bits and pieces of the Deccan Herald which my grandfather subscribed to (my parents subscribed to Kannada Prabha, and I could read that quite well, as well). I was bored of getting everything right in every test. So I started writing wrong spellings on purpose. It was the only way to entertain myself.

This kind of stuff continued throughout schooling. I remember reading my neighbour’s 9th standard math textbooks when I was in 7th standards. History lessons never interested me because my grandfather had told me all those stories and I remembered. On several occasions in middle and high school, I would know that what the teacher was teaching was wrong, but would be too bored to point that out to her because it would lead to a pointless argument (to my credit, I did try a few times, and it was very hard for the teachers to back down. After a while I simply stopped trying).

One offshoot of this being ahead of class was that I would be constantly bored in class, and I would identify this as a potential cause of some behavioural issues I faced as a child. Being the teacher’s pet and a general geek (I was the first guy in class to wear spectacles) meant that I was a popular target for bullying and practical jokes. I would take advantage of my size (I was comfortably the biggest kid in class) and would respond by beating up people. My parents spent most of my middle school listening to complaints from teachers about my being a bully and violent type!

As I grew older and learnt the merits of non-violence, I managed to overcome this, but the more damaging effect of always being ahead of class was that I was never challenged, and hence I never developed the habit of working hard, and when I tried to (when I went to IIT), it was too late. While I didn’t particularly top or “max” every test and exam in school, I sailed through fairly comfortably and never really had to do anything like work hard till I finished my 10th standard.

Then, I went to National Public School, which had a reasonably rigorous criterion for admission into 11th standard, so in some sense it was a “high performance centre”. But the problem there was what I call as the “11th standard free-rider teacher problem”, the cause of which is the IIT-JEE. Let me explain. In 11th standard, in a school such as NPS, most kids go for JEE coaching. Consequently, some teachers assume that all kids go to JEE coaching, and thus slacken their level of involvement and quality of teaching in the classroom. Those that are going for “tuition” don’t mind/notice this drop in quality. The rest do, but are too small a minority to affect things in class.

So yes, I did feel challenged in 11th standard. But then I took a (probably wise, in hindsight) decision to not care at all about the class tests and exams, and instead look long-term – towards success in the board exam and IIT-JEE. Working at my own pace, without really pushing myself too hard, I did rather well in both of them (after having been mostly in the bottom half of my class at NPS, of course, but I didn’t care about that). And then I went to IIT, which is where the troubles began.

IIT, thanks to its (then) selection criteria, is truly a “high performance centre”, in if not anything but in the quality of the students it takes in. There is also a sharp jump in the level of tuition compared to school. You are truly challenged and considerable work is called for in order to stay abreast in class. Being in Computer Science also means you are flooded with rather intensive programming assignments. It is difficult to do well unless you are really willing to work hard, and that is where I failed to cope. I had never put in anything close to that level of involvement. Suddenly thrown into the deep end of the pool (in terms of working hard), I struggled, and the continuous nature of evaluation meant that there was no point in “focusing on big exams” here, like I had in high school. Every little exam and assignment contributed to your final CGPA. I graduated as the median of the class, and I’ve never recovered.

IIM wasn’t that hard compared to IIT, but again I didn’t work too hard in courses I didn’t get too interested in, and barely graduated in the top quartile, an under-achievement given my comfort levels in most subjects.  And my lack of ability to work hard doggedly has cost me much in my corporate career also. Some tasks that most people consider “routine” have turned out to be insanely hard for me, and in some places I haven’t been able to cope with the workload. I have a problem working long hours with concentration. I’m good at problem solving but lack that “sheer fight” which is sometimes necessary to push things through.

And now, looking back, I think it has to do with my primary education. As Malcolm Gladwell says in his “10000 hours” essay in The Outliers, working hard is also a talent. And my comfort levels in school meant that I never had to develop on that front. It was all too easy, and I never had to work hard then. And then when I actually had to, I have been inadequate.

It makes me wonder if it might have made some sense for me to have been shifted to some sort of “high performance” school when I was found to be much ahead of class in primary school. Again, there would have been a problem in identification since being ahead of class is not necessarily correlated with performance in exams, but assuming I had been thus “identified”, what if I had been sent to say a special school where I had been challenged even as a kid? Where I never felt “oh this teacher doesn’t know anything, so no use listening to her” or “I know this is the wrong answer but I know this is what the examiner demands so I’ll write this”? Where I had been pushed to work hard in a meaningful fashion? I don’t know if I would’ve still been good at entrance exams and gone to the colleges I went to, but I have a sneaking feeling I would have been able to cope with life much better in that case. What do you think?

On Saturday I was at a Marwari wedding. Actually it was a Marwari Hindu marrying a Gujarati Jain (it was arranged scissors, if you’re curious about that), but the ceremony took place according to Hindu rites. As Gandhi and Khushboo were getting married, I was reminded of my own wedding a little over a year back, and I started mentally comparing the two ceremonies. Here I attempt to put those mental notes “on paper”.

I must mention upfront that I have only one data point (this particular wedding) for Marwari weddings. Also, while the wedding ceremony was still on, I was invited for lunch (in a curious twist, bride’s relatives and friends ate out of a buffet while the groom’s relatives and friends were served a multi-course meal on a silver platter. The food for both was the same, though). So I do not have the complete picture, though the lunch was in the same hall so I managed to observe some stuff as I ate. Also, since the groom in this case was Jain, there is a possibility of some Jain rituals having crept in to the ceremony, so my one data point may not actually be representative. For the Kannadiga Brahmin wedding, I use my own wedding as a data point (again not necessarily accurate, since the wife is technically Gult).

The general impression about North Indian weddings is that they are “action packed”, and a lot of fun. There is known to be much singing and dancing, while South Indian Brahmin weddings are generally solemn religious affairs. There was a fair share of fun at the Gandhi-Khushboo wedding. The previous evening there was a Sangeet where relatives of the bride and groom put up dance performances, which was followed by a general free-for-all dance party, and even a Garba session (and also a Marwari Karaoke session). The cars that were transporting us to the wedding stopped 100m away from the venue, where the groom ascended a mare and there was a brass band and we all danced around to the actual venue. I didn’t attend the reception but I’m sure that had its fun components, too.

However, I noticed that when it came to the ceremony itself, my wedding was much more action-packed and “fun” than this wedding. Yes, at my wedding, the rituals took much longer (started at 11am and ended at 5pm, while here it lasted two hours), but at no point of time was either me or the wife just sitting there doing nothing, which was the case for large sections of this wedding. Most of the time when I looked at the stage, the bride and groom were solemnly sitting in their seats (they had a low bench to sit on, unlike us who sat cross-legged on a low wooden board) doing nothing, as the priests chanted mantras into the microphone. On the other hand, we were constantly doing something. There were “fun” elements like throwing rice on each other’s heads, bargaining for an elephant, getting surrounded by a rope that was spun around by relatives around us, tying the thaaLi, the “Challenge Gopalakrishna moment”, etc.

This is a recent inclusion in both ceremonies, I think, but both weddings involved a phase where the bride and groom are lifted by their respective relatives and friends as they try to get the upper hand (literally) in the muhurtham. In my wedding, the muhurtham involved throwing cumin seeds and jaggery on each other’s heads. Legend is that whoever throws first has the upper hand in the marriage. Here, it was the bride trying to garland the groom and he trying to escape it. At my wedding, the large crowd meant that at that critical moment I was unable to locate my big friends, and had to get lifted by two or three relatives. I resorted to jumping to gain the upper hand (Priyanka had a bunch of big cousins ready to hoist her). It was the opposite story at Gandhi’s wedding. The groom’s party was small, and his brother had told us to be ready to lift him, so we used our “matki phod” skills to good effect to hoist him high.

In both ceremonies, it was the bride’s maternal uncle who performed the “kanyaadaanam” (literally “donation of the virgin”) and brought the bride for the muhurtham. Tradition has it that the uncle should carry the niece, and Khushboo arrived that way. Priyanka’s maternal uncle has a bad back so he simply escorted her to the stage. Then, in both ceremonies, there is the “installation” of bride and groom as Lakshmi and Narayana, and their supposedly divine status for the duration of the wedding. The groom’s shalya (upper cloth) is knotted with the bride’s sari, though since Gandhi was wearing a sherwani, he wore a sash over it for this purpose. Our installation as Lakshmi and Narayana had a fun element as the priest described us as (for example) “Venkataramana Shastri’s great-grandson, Suryanarayana Rao’s grandson, Shashidhar’s son Karthik” which was similar to the refrain in Challenge Gopalakrishna where Gopalakrishna’s father addresses him as “Justice Gopalakrishna’s greatgandson … ” (watch from 7:55 in this video).

The other major point of difference I noticed was in the revolution around the fire after throwing puffed rice in it (it’s a common ceremony in both). At my wedding, I led the way around the fire, but here it was the bride who led the way. I wonder what accounts for this difference, or if it is a minor thing that was missed by the priests.

Overall, I had a fantastic two days in Indore, getting pampered and having sweets thrust into my mouth, catching up with old friends and overall having loads of fun. And not to mention, getting fodder for this double-length blog post.

That’s the “disease” that I’ve been diagnosed with, following my rendezvous with a cow last Saturday. Before you begin to get ideas, let me explain. On day six of the Royal Enfield Tour of Rajasthan, I was speeding at about 70-80 kmph on a Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana road between Devikot and Shetrawa in Western Rajasthan on my Royal Enfield Classic 500. I was day-dreaming I think, but when I “woke up”, I realized there was a huge herd of cows ahead on the road. I panicked, and instead of applying the brakes, revved up and tried going around the herd. Unfortunately for me, one of the cows too decided to strafe to the right. I had no choice but to hit her.

The next thing I know, my shoulder has already hit the ground and my helmet is hitting the ground. My camera that was around my neck has been thrown off, and the part that connects the camera to the lens has been broken. I’m dazed, my bike is flat on the ground with petrol oozing out of the tank and I can see major scratch marks on my visor. And my right little finger and left thumb hurt. Manju, who has just overtaken the herd, sees my fall in the rearview mirror and comes to my aid. The Shimoga boys soon materialize and pull up my bike. Then, the Enfield support team arrives and puts both me and my bike back on track in 20 minutes. My hand still hurts, though.

An X-ray the following day reveals a fracture in my fifth metacarpal. The resident at MG Hospital in Jodhpur (a Sarkari institution) wants to put a cast, but I want to ride on and finish the tour and I resist. Anti-inflammatory drugs, a crepe bandage and a promise to get a cast as soon as I return to Bangalore form a compromise solution. I take off the bandage every morning to put on my riding gloves, and ride on. With a minor adjustment in riding style, I completely forget the injury. I get back “into form”, ride the way I used to in the first half of the tour, have another (less serious) accident, complete the trip, go to Indore for Gandhi’s wedding and return to Bangalore.

I go to see my uncle who is an orthopedic surgeon. Taking a look at the X-ray, he asks me if I’ve been punching walls while drunk. I’m suffering from a “boxer’s fist“, he says, and adds that there is little that can be done to “cure” it. My hand will heal on its own in a month, but when it does, my fourth knuckle would have disappeared, he says. “Then you will go to a pub, and hold a mug of beer, and people around you will see that you don’t have a fourth knuckle. And they will assume that on some drunken night you were punching walls, and have thus ended up with a boxer’s fist. Then, you can tell them that you injured yourself thus when you had a riding accident with a cow”.

The injury was due to impact. Because I panicked when I saw that cows, I held on to the bike’s handlebars too tight, and when I hit the cow, the handlebar jammed against the side of my hand, thus breaking my fifth metacarpal. Protective riding gear meant that the actual fall itself left me unscathed despite my head hitting the ground. My helmet needed a new visor (who would’ve thunk that the extra visor I carried in my luggage would come useful?), my riding jacket has been torn at the shoulder and the protective padding on the back of the hand of my riding gloves has been badly dented. When my bike arrives in Bangalore, it’ll be sent to “hospital” to cure a few dents. It still runs well, though.

About a month back I happened to watch some random Kannada movie playing on TV starring wifebeater Darshan (it was called “Boss”, I think). It seemed like yet another of those typical masala flicks, with twin brothers and a weeping mother and lots of rowdies and corporate rivalry and all that. Overall it was a mostly sad movie but for me the biggest turn-off was the final fight-scene that takes place in some warehouse.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a big fan of action movies. After we got our VCP, I remember going up to the videotape rental store close to home every Saturday evening and asking for “some fighting movie”. I didn’t care at all for the story or the lack of  it in any movie I saw. All I cared about was for “action”. After I had whetted my initial appetite for “fighting movies” by watching a bunch of Shankarnag action flicks (CBI Shankar, the Sangliana movies, etc.) my father started bringing home James Bond movies. I remember watching You Only Live Twice and Moonraker back then. I remember watching The Spy Who Loved Me, too, but there was a problem with the tape so I wasn’t able to watch it fully.

Coming back to Darshan and Boss, the turn-off about the fight scene was that it was an unbelievable “brute force” scene. The hero, a rather muscular sort of guy, singlehandedly beats up a whole bunch of bad guys. And it’s not even in the traditional form where the bad guys come one by one. They all come together and attack him and he repels them all simultaneously by means of sheer superhuman muscular strength. There was absolutely no fun in watching it. It was a similar story with the Puneet Rajkumar starrer Jackie, which I saw on TV last weekend. Though it was a rather well-made movie with a nice (and unusual) storyline, it again suffered from the problem of a superhuman hero who would overpower bad guys by means of muscular strength.

Earlier today I happened to watch the “Indian James Bond movie” Goadalli CID 999 starring Dr. Rajkumar. A rather poor attempt to make a “James Bond style” movie in Kannada, with a rather lame plot and underground hideouts involving automatic doors and the likes. The redeeming feature of the movie, though, was the fight scenes, especially the ones with Narasimharaju (who plays CID 888, 999′s sidekick). Clearly recognizing that this fellow didn’t have any means of brawn to beat up the bad guys, the fight scenes were “elegant”, where the good guy uses his brain rather than muscular strength in order to overpower the villains. So you have a gun that fires ten seconds after the trigger is pulled, and you have the good guy getting the bad guys to shoot each other, and things like that. It was a joy to watch.

The unfortunate trend in recent Kannada movies, though, is to make a superpower hero who simply beats the bad guys, which completely takes the joy out of fight scenes. That clever movement to deflect a punch, the use of easily available props to get away from the bad guys, setting bad guys against each other, stuff like this is completely missing from these movies. One reason could be that directors are not imaginative enough to put more care into fight scenes to make them enjoyable (though this is doubtful given that the general quality of Kannada movies in the last 5 years is better than that of earlier movies). The other reason has to do with the actors who play these roles. Perhaps they want to build up a superhero kind of image among their fans, one in which they can do no wrong and are supremely powerful. And a scene where they have to rely more on their intelligence and trickery to win a fight might go against this kind of an image they want to cultivate. Whatever it is, it only goes to remove entertainment value from a fight which could have been a joy to watch.

My all time favourite movie fight scene is from the “original” Don, featuring Amitabh Bachchan. The centre of attraction in this scene is this little red diary which contains all the information about the bad guys, and the good and bad guys are fighting for it. In the mix are a bunch of kids, the heroine, a paralyzed stuntman and of course the hero. The good guys play “monkey” with the diary, and in the process beat up the bad guys. It is an absolute joy to watch and for me that was the high point of the movie. Sadly, they don’t make movies like that any more.

B-schools based in the US use a unique self-selecting mechanism to filter out applicants who might be a bad fit for a management job. This they achieve by making the application process more complicated, but in a way that the kind of people they hope to attract find it simple.

Let me explain. Like most other graduate programs in the US, B-schools also require applicants to get a set of letters of recommendation. Unlike other programs, though, these are not simple letters of recommendation. Rather than the recommender simply writing out one essay where he/she extols the virtue of the candidate he/she is recommending and requests the university to grant admission, here he/sh has to answer a bunch of questions that the university is asking for. These questions might range from the mundane sounding (I’m told there’s a catch, though) “How do you know the applicant?” to some high-sounding stuff like “What is your opinion of the leadership qualities of the applicant? How can that be improved?”. World limit for all questions put together comes to 1500 words.

So now, if someone comes to you asking for a recommendation, unless you are really invested in their careers you will not want to put the enthu of putting so much effort. If you like the candidate, you might be willing to put in some time into it, but you are likely to wholeheartedly produce four good essays for each school the applicant is applying (note that no two schools ask the same question) only if you feel really invested in the applicant’s career, the probability of which is really low.

By having such a complicated system of soliciting recommendations, the schools ensure that all candidates fall into one of two categories. Either they should have done so well in one of their jobs that their boss or client feels invested enough to spend a few hours of their time writing recommendations, or they should have the necessary people management skills to go to bosses and clients and professors to get them to write the recommendations. Of course, irrespective of how good your people management skills are , it is unlikely to get someone to spend so many hours on your recommendation letters. Still, the minimum you require is to convince them that you will write the recommendation yourself and they should rubber stamp it. No big deal, that.

This way, all applicants to US B-schools are people who have a knack of getting things done. The age at which application happens (mid to late twenties) also minimizes parental participation in the effort. Apart from the self-selection and filtration, the amount of time and effort required for application also helps weed out frivolous candidates (remember those that “wrote CAT just as a backup”?).

Sometime last week, the wife wanted to know more about management consulting, and I was trying to explain to her the kind of work that consulting firms do. I told her that the two most important skills to have in order to be a successful consultant are structured thinking and people skills, and in order to illustrate the former I put her through a “case” on the lines of those that consulting firms use in order to interview.

The importance of structured thinking, I explained, lay in the fact that not all problems that consulting firms pose have a definitive solution, and structure helps you hedge against not being able to generate a solution. In the worst case, if you follow this approach, you would have made a contribution to the client solely by putting a structure on their problem, and by enabling them to think better about similar problems that cropped up in the future. This is also the reason that consulting firms use the much-touted (and much-abused) frameworks – they are a good method of structuring the problem, I said.

I then went on to talk about how I’m not much of a structured thinker, and how I frauded my way in through that during my consulting interviews nearly six years back. On joining a consulting firm, I’d found myself thoroughly disillusioned and out of my depth, and finding that the job called for a completely different set of skills than what I possessed. The nature of problem solving, I found, was very different from the kind I’d been mostly exposed to, and enjoyed. I quit in a matter of months.

I went on to narrate a story from my B-school days. It was about the final exam of a second year course, and I’ve blogged about it. The question presented a business problem and asked us to find a solution for it. I thought for a bit, figured out the solution (with a bit of thinking it was obvious) and explained it two or three paragraphs. My friend had instead put a structure on the problem, and used all possible applicable frameworks in order to structure it. He has been working for a consulting firm since graduation, and I’m told he’s doing rather well. You know my story.

So we talked a bit more about problem solving approaches, and how I could possibly structure my business now that I’m an independent consultant (given that I’m not a particularly structured person). During the course of this conversation I happened to mention that most of my early problem solving was in terms of programming. And the wife jumped on this. “You are a mental math guy, aren’t you?”, she asked. I nodded, feeling happy inside about those days when I would do three-digit multiplications in my head while my classmates still struggled with “six in the mind, four in the hand” methods of doing addition. “And you’re an algorithms guy, always trying to find the easiest method to solve problems?”, she continued. Again I replied in the affirmative. “Then how the hell could you even think that you would do well in a job that requires structured thinking?”

She has a point there. Why didn’t I think of this earlier? The more pertinent question now is about how I’m going to structure my data modeling business since it’s clear that I won’t be able to pull off the classical consulting model.

this post was written yesterday when blog was down, so posting it now. 

Bob: Damn, I’ve to go to Eve’s party tonight

Alice: Oh, but I thought you actually wanted to go?

Bob: Nope, I have other things to do and it’s inconvenient to go. But if I don’t go, Eve will get hurt.

Alice: I remember you saying the same thing the last time Eve invited you for a party.

Bob: That’s true, but I really care about Eve and don’t want to hurt her.

Alice: Tell me, have you ever told Eve that you don’t particularly enjoy her parties?

Bob: Nope, she would get hurt if I said that.

Alice: So you’ve never told her that you don’t enjoy it. And you’ve always accepted her invitations.

Bob: That’s true.

Alice: So how should Eve know that these parties are inconvenient for you? If she were to somehow get to know, maybe next time she may not invite you, and spare you the trouble of boring yourself at her party.

Bob: But she would get hurt if she were to somehow find out that I don’t enjoy her parties!

Alice: That is your problem, then. You don’t have any right to crib about her parties!

I remember being invited for a distant relative’s housewarming ceremony a few years back. The invitation card proudly stated “lunch: 12:30 pm”. I had a quiz to attend later that afternoon, at 3 pm, I think. Knowing there was enough slack for me to go to the function, thulp lunch and then go to the quiz, I went. At 12:15 (I have this habit of turning up at functions fifteen minutes prior to food; that way I don’t get bored, and people won’t think I’ve “just come for lunch”). Some ceremonies were going on. 1:15. Ceremonies continue to go on, no sign of lunch. 1:45, I realize there’s no slack at all, and want to leave without eating. Relatives get offended. Finally I went to the cooks, thulped some sweets and went off to the quiz.

Almost ten years back. My thread ceremony (upanayanam/brahmopadesham/munji). The priest arrives at the hall at eight o’clock, a full thirty minutes late. “My colleagues are coming at 12:30″, explains my father, “and we should serve lunch by that time. I don’t care what shortcuts you use but make sure we can serve lunch then”. Maybe munji rituals aren’t that compressable after all. Come 12:30, there were still quite a few procedures to go. Lunch was served while the ceremony continued to go on.

Religious functions are notorious for serving lunch late, and the religious purpose of the function is often used as an excuse to do so. I fully support religious freedom, and fully appreciate people’s choice to perform whatever ceremonies that they want. Keeping guests waiting while you do that and delaying their lunch, however, I think is gross disrespect for the guests’ time. And the sad thing is that religion is usually given as an excuse for this disrespect of time.

When you bring religion into a debate, it sometimes becomes tough to pursue a rational debate. In religious functions, if you were to make even the smallest noises about the timing of lunch, you are accused of being inconsiderate, an ingrate, and for having come there only for the food (I don’t know if the last mentioned is actually a crime). It is disrespectful to leave from such functions unless you’ve eaten, and so you are trapped into cancelling other appointments, and staying on until they actually decide to take pity and serve lunch.

I’ve brought up this topic in family forums a few times, and each time I’ve been chided for making such a big issue of something trivial. I don’t, however, understand how lunch is a trivial issue. And how disrespect for people’s time is a trivial issue. I have decided that the next time I attend one such religious function, where there is potential for the hosts to waste guests’ time by serving food inordinately late, I’ll take along a framed printout of Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem. And tell them that all their prayers and respect to god will have no effect unless they also respect their fellow men.

We Indians have a “home food” culture. Most people consider it immoral and “bad” to eat out, and more so to eat out on a regular basis. People who don’t cook food at home are termed as being lazy. I remember this story I’d read in Tinkle back when I was a kid. It was called “kaLLa giriyaNNa” (it was a translation of a Kannada story). In this story, the thief (kaLLa) GiriyaNNa is scolded by his wife for his “dirty habits of smoking beedis and eating in hotels”. Yes, traditional Indian homes look down upon eating out that much!

Till very recently, this was a result of caste taboos. People would refuse to eat food that was prepared by someone by another caste, and that led to a delay in the growth of the restaurant industry. When people traveled (even on business, and you need to remember that in India even today, a lot of business happens due to caste networks), they would try and stay with a relative, or a friend who belonged to the same caste, and would eat in their house. When I was a kid, outstation holidays were mostly restricted to towns and cities where we had relatives, and in case we didn’t have any, durable foodstuff such as bread (from our “usual” Iyengar’s bakery), biscuits and fruits would be carried, so that we could avoid eating out.

Thanks to this cultural preference, and the taboos associated with eating out, we have turned out to be a “home food” society. Most people cook in their homes on a daily basis, or at least attempt to do so. In my mind, this is clearly inefficient. Back when I was in Gurgaon when I lived alone and would cook for myself, I discovered the beauty that is economies of scale in cooking food. The incremental time and effort in making (say) three liters of Sambar compared to making (say) half a liter was small, and consequently, every time I made sambar, I would make it in large quantities, and keep it in the fridge and repeatedly re-heat. While this may not be particularly healthy (the wife blames some of my lifestyle diseases to prolonged exposure to this unhealthy habit of eating stale food), there was little else I could do in order to achieve said economies of scale.

There is, however, a better method of ensuring economies of scale, and on a much larger scale – restaurants, and this is the practice followed in most places elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately, the taboo against eating out means that for most people, visits to restaurants are “treats”, and restaurants have adapted themselves to accommodate this. When people eat in order to treat themselves, their primary criterion is taste. When you eat something once in a while, you don’t really care about the calories or sugar or triglycerides it contains. Consequently, food in a large number of restaurants in India is tailored for this kind of an audience, and hence is not particularly healthy. The main complaint that people have against restaurant food – that it is not healthy, and that one cannot eat that every day, does have its merits, but has a background in the culture of eating out only for treats.

From a national efficiency standpoint, this needs to change. People are spending way too much time and effort in cooking their own meals. It is ok to cook once in a while, but spending an hour of your day every day in front of the stove is a colossal waste of time. The answer lies in good quality restaurants that serve food that is similar to “home-cooked” food, in terms of health factor and taste. If there is a good number of restaurants that start doing that, it will drive a number of people to stop cooking at home (the early adopters are likely to be DINK Yuppies).

In some ways, this reminds me of the Chennai auto-rickshaw problem that I’ve described here and here. Restaurants don’t want to give up on tasty food and go the “healthy way” because they’re not sure there’s enough of a demand for the latter. People are not willing to give up home food in favour of restaurants because the food is not healthy enough! Again, this needs a nudge. And you can see some efforts in this direction. Back when I was in IIMB, I remember having dinner once at this place called Bangliana, which served “traditional” Bengali food at a reasonable price (a Bong friend who accompanied me confirmed that the food was quite authentic and “homely”). In primarily immigrant-dominated localities (such as Koramangala), you see more such restaurants coming up, and that is a good thing. If only it can spread and we move to becoming a restaurant-based culture, precious man-hours (and woman-hours) are bound to be saved.

PS: If the provisions of the Food Security Bill imply that we move to a “ration” model again, it would mean a step backwards, where everyone would be forced to cook at home. Or maybe the act could be implemented differently.. Say you could partly pay at hotels using your “entitlement points”.. Anyway, that is an aside.