bangalore – Page 9 – Pertinent Observations

Flower Sellers

If you have ever been to Church Street in Bangalore, you would have come across this girl. It is extremely hard to miss her, and it is likely that she has pestered you at least once in your life. She was little the first time I saw her, but I happened to come across her recently, and she seems to have grown up now.

She is a fair girl, with a pleasant face. Her hair is usually tied up in two plaits, and whenever I have seen her, she is wearing this woollen pullover over her salwar. Her job is to sell flowers, red roses to be precise. And the first time I happened to see her was four summers ago, when I was walking down Church Street with a girl to whom I hoped to give red roses. And as her profession warrants, she was trying to sell us a red rose.

The worst insult you can give to a street vendor is to turn them into a beggar. Hawking on the streets is respectable business, it is a signal that you are willing to work for your living and don’t want to be shown pity. It is another matter that most street vendors don’t really get this and literally beg you to buy their product. Nevertheless, they do get extremely offended if you were to treat them like you would treat a beggar. That fundamental difference is there.

My companion on that day hadn’t wanted the flowers, not even if I were to gift them to her as a token of love. The flower seller, however, wouldn’t go away. Maybe she had figured that marketing to couples was an extremely profitable strategy, and didn’t want to let go of this opportunity. My companion had proceeded to pull out twenty rupees and give them to the vendor, asking her to keep it and not give her any flowers. Incensed at being treated like a beggar, the poor flower seller had run away. I don’t know if something snapped in me at that moment, but we broke up under inexplicable circumstances a couple of hours later.

Cut the scene forward by three years, three months and three days, and change the venue of the scene to Gandhi Bazaar in South Bangalore. It was a different vendor this time, and she was selling jasmine on strings. It was dark, and her face was dark, so I don’t really think I’ll recognize her if I see her another time. It was late in the evening so her stock of jasmine was almost over, and she was trying to get rid of whatever was left.

I was meeting this girl (not the vendor) for the first time that day, and her reaction was swift. “I’ll buy some for my mum”, she declared and quickly cleared the vendor’s stock. My mind quickly went back to that day on Church Street three years, three months and three days earlier.

Louis, I thought, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Swarovski Earrings

On Friday evening I tweeted:

Louis philippe best white shirt – rs X1
Swarovski crystal earrings – rs X2
Dinner at taj west end – rs X3
Proposal accepted – priceless

Now I must confess that there was a lie. Which I tried to mask by using variables for the various values. Of course, at the time of tweeting this, I didn’t know the value of X3; though I figured it out an hour later. The value of X1 is well known. The lie was in the X2 bit. The thing is I don’t know. Because the Swarovski crystal earrings weren’t bought; they were won.

Back in 2000 when I entered IIT Madras, I started doing extremely bad in quizzes there. It took me a long while to get adjusted to the format there (long questions, all-night quizzes… ) and a lot of stuff that got asked there was about stuff that I didn’t care much about so I didn’t really bother doing well. There’s this old joke that every IITM quiz should start and end with a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) question with two more LOTR questions in the middle, and all this is only in one half of the quiz.

In my first year there, there was also the additional problem of finding good people to quiz with. You invariably ended up going with someone either from your hostel or your class who might have attended their school trials for the Bournvita Quiz Contest, or sometimes quizzers you know from Bangalore. Still, the lack of a settled team meant that there was a cap on how well one could do. All through first year, I didn’t qualify in a single quiz, neither in Madras nor when I came home to Bangalore.

Second year was marginally different. There was still no settled team but the format wasn’t strange any more. And quizzes had started to get a little more general and less esoteric. I had started to qualify, or just miss qualification, in some quizzes. And around this time, while struggling with VLSI circuits and being accused by the Prof of being potential WTC Bombers (this was a few days after 9/11) I heard God and Ranga talk about some Dakshinachitra where they had qualified for the finals.

So Dakshinachitra is this heritage center on East Coast Road and they had been conducting an India Quiz. It was a strange format – three rounds of prelims with two teams (of two people) qualifying from each round. God and Ranga had gone for the first round of prelims and had sailed through. They had told me the competition hadn’t been too tough and so the following week Droopy and I headed out, taking some random local bus to the place.

We too made it peacefully to the finals and then found that it had turned out to be an all-IIT finals. However, they refused to shift the venue of the finals to the IIT campus and so all of us had to brave the Saturday afternoonMadras sun and head out again to the place. Thankfully this time they’d organized a bus from somewhere close to IIT.

I don’t remember too much of the finals apart from the fact that there was a buzzer round with extremely high stakes, in which Droopy and I did rather well. I remember one question in the buzzer round being cancelled because an audience member shouted out the answer. I remember there was this fraud-max specialist round where we were quizzed on a topic we’d picked beforehand. Thankfully the stakes there weren’t too high. It wasn’t a great quiz by general quizzing standards but what mattered was we won, marginally ahead of God and Ranga in a close finish.

The next morning Droopy and I appeard in the supplement pages of the New Indian Express, holding this huge winner’s certificate with Air India’s name on it (they took back that certificate as soon as the photo was taken). We were promised one return ticket each by Air India to any destination in some really limited list, but somehow they frauded on it and we could never fly. God and Ranga got a holiday each in some resort, and I don’t think they took that, too.

There were a lot of random things as prizes. There were some random old music CDs. Maybe some movie CDs too. I remember God and Ranga getting saris (god (not God, maybe God also) knows what they did with it). Droopy and I got coupons from VLCC. I put NED to encash them. Droopy went and was given a free haircut. And then there were these earrings.

Not knowing what to do with them, I just gave them to my mother. She, however, refused to wear them saying that since I’d won them, it was only appropriate that they go to my wife. So she put them away in the locker in my Jayanagar house and told me to take them out only when I had decided who I wanted to marry. And I, then a geeky 18-year old IITian, had decided to use these earrings while proposing marriage.

So early in the evening on Friday I went to the Jayanagar house and took the earrings out of the locker. What followed can be seen in the tweet. Oh, and now you might want to start following this blog.

PS: apologies for the extra-long post, but given the nature of the subject I suppose you can’t blame me for getting carried away

Loos in America

Ok I’ve spent quite a few (>1) blog posts after coming here on input so let me write one on output. In fact for a long time I’ve intended to write a post on loos in India but have never got the time. Hopefully I’ll sit down to write it some day. Today, you’ll have to make do with American shyte.

The last time I found facilities in a loo for washing the arse (or thoLyin the thika) was at the Dubai airport on my way here where there was a health faucet. As has been well documented Islamic cultures place a lot of emphasis of keeping the arse clean and hence the ubiquity of this contraption in all Islamic countries (and of late in India also). As has also been well documented, western cultures prefer to keep the loos clean and hence use paper to wipe the arse after the process.

In my serviced apartment I’ve been doing one of the usual Indian things – I’ve kept a drinking glass in the bathroom and use it as a mug. Yeah its volume is quite low but that’s the best I can manage. Thankfully the taps aren’t too far away so I can manage. My biggest fear, however, is that I’ll drop this glass in the bathroom and might injure my feet. Office, however, offers no such luxuries so I’ve to make do with paper. When in Amreeka, do your ass like the Amreekans do.

My apartment and my office have two contrasting flushing systems, both of which seem superior to the system we have in India (the flush in my apartment in Bangalore is especially inefficient, especially when I download large volumes). At home, water starts swirling around in the WC as soon as I pull the trigger, slowly and steadily. Soon the pace picks up and the water level starts going down, pulling the crap along with it. And in a few seconds the pot is clean, and new water comes in so the level of water in the pot is restored. Actually I’ve noticed that the normal level of water in the pot in my apartment is much higher than it normally is in western loos. I think it’s similar to a football defence playing with a high offside line!

Office is a new building so has even more sophisticated loo. First of all the flush is automated – as soon as you get up and start buttoning up your pants the thing goes, though there’s a button which you can push in case the automatic thing fails. This is the first time ever that I’ve seen automatic flush in a pottystation. I’d earlier seen it only in urinals.

So the flush operates with a vacuum mechanism, much like the flushes on flights. So some pump gets into operation and sucks in all the shit and the paper and everything else in one smooth motion. And then there is a water jet to clean up any remnants, and that gets sucked in too. Finally, there is some fresh water ready to take shit.

The best thing I’ve found about my office loo, however, is the seat paper. So in this special compartment in the potty station you get paper that’s shaped in the plan of the commode (plan as in top view; I hope you can picturize). So when you go in, you pull out one such paper and put it on to the seat, and then take your seat and do your business. And once business is done, send this paper also packing into the WC!

Excellent idea, I think, because the biggest crib that people have about commodes is that they have to rest bare arse on the same space that hosted some other bare arse and this may not be healthy. Providing this facility allows you to take insurance about that, and you need not put your ass-to-risk*. I hope this starts getting implemented soon enough in India also, especially in public facilities.

Some links:

1. Vikram Doctor’s excellent take on toilets
2. One earlier time when I had blogged about toilets at work
3. An earlier post of mine, on washing your arse in the Thames
4. A post on loos and sacred threads. One of those one-liner posts I stopped posting after I started tweeting. This post would become significant later in my life in a most unusual manner

Bangalore Book Festival

So today I made my way to Gayatri Vihar in the Palace Grounds to visit the Bangalore Book Festival, on its last day. It was interesting, though a bit crowded (what would you expect on the last day of an exhibition? and that too, when it’s a Sunday?). I didn’t buy much (just picked up two books) given the massive unread pile that lies at home. However, there was much scope for pertinent observations. Like I always do when I have a large number of unrelated pertinent observations, I’ll write this in bullet point form.

There were some 200 stalls. Actually, there might have been more. I didn’t keep count, despite the stalls having been numbered. Yeah, you can say that I wasn’t very observant.
All the major bookshops in Bangalore barring the multicity ones had set up shop there. I don’t really know what they were doing there. Or were they just trying to capture the market that only buys in fairs? Or did they set up stall there just to advertise themselves?
It seems like a lot of shops were trying to use the fair to get rid of inventory they wanted to discard. All they had to do was to stack all of this on one table and put a common price tag (say Rs. 50) on every book in that collection, and it was enough to draw insane crowds
One interesting stall at the fair had been set up by pothi.com an online self-publishing company. I’ll probably check them out sometime next year when I might want to publish a blook. Seems like an interesting business model they’ve got. Print on demand!
I also met the flipkart.com guys at the fair. Once again, they were there for advertising themselves. Need to check them out sometime. Given the kind of books I buy, I think online is the best place to get long tail stuff.
There was an incredibly large number of islamic publishing houses at the fair! And have you guys seen the “want qur an? call 98xxxxxxxx for free copy” hoardings all over the city? Wonder why the Bajrang Dal doesn’t target those
There was large vernacular presence at the fair. I remember reading in the papers that there was a quota for Kannada publishers, but there was reasonable presence for other languages also, like Gult, Tam, Mellu, Hindi
A large number of stalls were ideology driven. Publishing houses attached to cults had set up stalls, probably to further the cause of their own cult. So there was an ISKCON stall, a Ramakrishna Mutt stall, a Ramana Maharshi stall, etc.
Attendance at most of these niche stalls was quite thin, as people mostly crowded the stalls being run by bookstores in order to hunt for bargains. Attendance was also mostly thin at publisher-run stalls, making me wonder why most of these people had bothered to come to the fair at all.
I saw one awesomely funny banner at the place. It was by “Dr Partha Bagchi, the world leader in stammering for last 20 years” or some such thing. Was too lazy to pull out my phone and click pic. But it was a masterpiece of a banner
Another interesting ideological publisher there was “Leftword books”. Their two sales reps were in kurtas and carrying jholas (ok I made the latter part up). And they were sellling all sorts of left-wing books. Wonder who funds them! And they were also selling posters of Che for 10 bucks each
I wonder what impact this fair will have on bookstores in Bangalore in the next few days. Or probably it was mostly the non-regular book buyers who did business at the fair and so the regulars will be back at their favourite shops tomorrow.

I bought two books. Vedam Jaishankar’s Casting A Spell: A history of Karnataka cricket (I got it at Rs. 200, as opposed to a list price of Rs 500) and Ravi Vasudevan’s “Making Meaning in Indian Cinema”.

Arranged Scissors 14 – Losing Heart

I’ve been in this market for a while now. It was sometime in February that my mother decided that I had utterly failed in my attempts to find myself a long-term gene-propagating female partner, and that she needed to step in and find someone for me. It was sometime in March that I went to this shady photo studio at DLF Galleria in Gurgaon and got a “wedding profile” snap taken. Later in March, I got listed at some shadymax exchange in Malleswaram. And there was the “market visit”.

The last weekend of this March I was in Bangalore, and was taken to this shady-max exchange in Malleswaram for a “market visit”. My uncle had told me that we needed to go sufficiently early, since there were apparently profiles of six hundred girls that I had to inspect that day, and make a shortlist. We had had a hurried breakfast at a Darshini in JP Nagar and then headed out to the exchange. My uncle, aunt and mother took turns to go up to the counter there and fetch the “smartha brides” files one by one. And I would spend about a minute on each file – which had fifty profiles. The six hundred profiles were done in less than a quarter of an hour. Phallus had simply refused to budge.

Aadisht, via his friend Vishakh, came up with this awesome framework of “head, heart, phallus“. The basic funda is that in order for you to enter into a long-term gene-propagating relationship, your head, heart and phallus need to independently like the counterparty (women insert appropriate substitute into the 3rd component). There is nothing earth-shaking about this framework as another of my friends pointed out, but the important thing is that it distinguishes between heart and phallus. Which I think most other explanations of louvvu (including bollywood movies) tend to ignore. And people also ignore it and get confused between heart approval and phallic approval, leading to disaster.

I had taken a long break from this arranged scissors market – a combination of being generally disgusted, poor health and being in between jobs. Recently (with the advent of Navaratri) I’d gotten back, and realize that I’ve lost my heart. Yeah, you might think this sounds funny but it’s not. I’ve truly lost my heart. And the only good that can come out of this is that if a crocodile catches and threatens to eat me, I can tell it the truth.

This whole arranged scissors concept seems to dehumanize the wonderful concept of long-term gene-propagating relationships. You are expected to make your decisions quickly, and you are expected to design “questionnaires” so as to get the maximum amount of info through each meeting. You are expected to browse through files containing six hundred profiles and make a shortlist. And when you are in the process of making the shortlist, you have your mom and aunt peering over your shoulder with helpful comments such as “this girl’s mouth is too wide” or “that girl’s nose is too blunt”.

For a while you resist, and resolve that you won’t get sucked into this mess. You resolve that you are still looking for “true louvvu” (whatever that is) and won’t settle for a common minimum program. You resolve that you’ll use the arranged marriage exchange as a dating agency. And soon it begins getting to you. You begin to see the merits of judging noses as too flat and mouths as too wide. You start breaking a girl down into components, and giving marks to each, and taking a weighted average to see if it is beyond “pass marks” (ok I’m obviously exagggerating here). You agree to meet potential counterparties even if you know that it’s improbable that you’ll like her.

My head, I think, is doing quite fine. So is the phallus. However, I think I’ve lost my heart. It’s been three and a half years since I even hit on someone. My heart seems to have forgotten how to love, and to have a “crush”. I’ve forgotten how my heart used to react during prior blades. In each of those cases, if I remember right, it was the heart that initiated it, and the head and phallus only gave approval later. Now, I have no clue how that used to happen. That seems so improbable.

This whole concept of meeting people with the explicit intention of evaluating them for long-term gene-propagating relationships is seedy. I think it goes against the laws of nature, and completely ruins that wonderful feeling that one usually associates with louvvu. It makes you too judgmental (I’m judgmental otherwise also, but not this judgmental), and you are so busy evaluating her that you don’t enjoy it at all. And how can you trust your judgment when you know that you haven’t liked the process of judgment at all?

Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.

Breakfast at Maiya’s

It is incredible that a South Indian restaurant in South Bangalore can charge forty rupees for a plate of idli-vada, and not just get away with it, but also run a full house. By the time I was getting out of Maiya’s (in Jayanagar 4th block; I’d written about their dinner earlier) it seemed like the first floor was already full and people were being directed to the seating area on the second floor. Apart from these, in a separate area on the ground floor, there is a breakfast buffet (priced at Rs. 125 on weeekdays and Rs. 150 on Sundays).

The food was good but nothing exceptional. Perhaps I don’t find it exceptional since a lot of my South Indian eating out happens at one of the Vasudev Adiga’s restaurants, which I believe are significantly superior to the other “Darshinis”. The food at Maiya’s was approximately of the same standard as that of a Vasudev Adiga’s, and the coffee (served in a silver tumbler) was incredibly superior. And the place was full. I didn’t bother to exactly estimate the capacity of the place but I think the hall seats around 100 people.

The service was good and quick (except for the coffee which took an hour to arrive), and the waiters weren’t overbearing (unlike those on the third floor where I’d had the silver thali last month). It perhaps gives an idea as to what Adiga’s might have been had it gone into the business of running sit-down restaurants. I haven’t tried making an estimate of the finances, so I don’t really know how well it works out financially to have a sit-down restaurant priced at about 100% premium over similar food at fast-food joints.

The success of Maiya’s in Jayanagar also gives us an indication as to what my neighbours the Kamats (of Yatri Nivas, Lokaruchi, etc.) have missed out – having held a virtual monopoly over sit-down south indian restaurants over the last ten years during which most other sit-down places were downing their shutters and most of the new upstarts have been stand-and-eat types. If only the Kamats had been able to get a hold on their quality, they probably wouldn’t have had to go into the business of Chinese restaurants (chung-wah-opus in Jayanagar 3rd block) or capuccino shops.

Also, Maiya’s is what I call as a “full-service restaurant” – one that serves food throughout the day – as opposed to Darshinis which are typically breakfast-and-evening-snacks focused, or the fine dining places which do only meals. What that allows the Maiyas to do is to maximize their usage of space – since they will be using the same seating infrastructure throughout the day. I remember saying a couple of years back that darshinis should have a time-share arrangement with fine-dining places.

Another nice feature at Maiya’s is the tables. They have a large number of tables which can seat two people across, and which have been designed so as to easily join them to other tables. The chairs are also simple and light and can be moved around. This allows the restaurant to easily reorient the tables and chairs depending upon the size of various dining parties, without resorting to making people share tables with strangers (common practice in south indian restaurants).

Today probably the restaurant was relatively lean, so my mother and I got a table for four (basically 2 tables joined together). However, if the restaurant had reached capacity, I’m sure they’d’ve yanked off one of the tables and given it to someone else.

The food is good but not spectacular, but you can sit down and eat. Go on a weekday when it is not crowded, and you’ll enjoy it. Don’t botehr waiting in line to get in to eat on a Sunday – you might as well take a parcel from the nearest Adigas and eat at home.

2 plates 2-idli-1-vada           2 * 40          Rs. 80
1 plate rava idli                      1 * 25           Rs. 25
1 coffee (silver tumbler)        1 * 15            Rs. 15
1 tea (silver tumbler)              1 * 15            Rs. 15

———————————————————

Total Rs. 135

Tips not accepted.

PS: On the ground floor, at the side, they have one stand-up coffee shop, which operates between 6am and 8pm on all days of the week (the restaurant is closed on Mondays). Absolutely brilliant coffee. Among the best I’ve had in Bangalore. I would recommend you to try it out the next time you pass by the area. Rupees ten only.

Family Associations

I spent some time this afternoon looking at the address book released by the association of descendants of my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandfather (yes, I’m serious; there does exist one such association). Since I didn’t have much else to do, I did go through much of the book in detail. The makers seem to have put hajaar fight in order to prepare it – calling up thousands of descandants and asking them for addresses and phone numbers. It also took quite long to make I suppose – my address and phone number that is put there are from last August.

The first thing I noticed about our family is that there is no such thing as a “family tree”. Us being Kannada Types and the customary incest being there, there are lots of cycles in the “family tree”. I noticed at least two cases of first cousins being married to each other. The book has handled this rather inelegantly – putting the same pair of names and addresses in two places. However, I don’t know how they could’ve handled it more elegantly without embarrassing the incestuous couples – since the concept has become taboo only recently.

It was also interesting to look at the geographical distribution of the family. As expected, the maximum number of addresses are from Bangalore. Interestingly, Mysore also seems to have a lot of people from the family, with not too many people inhabiting other parts of India. There is an incredibly large number of people from the family in America, and they seem to be distributed in almost all parts – though with a bias to California (not just the Bay Area – I saw a number of southern California addresses.

Interestingly, other countries have little representation. There is one family in Australia and a couple of families in the Gelf. Interestingly, there is no one in England (the book lists two families with England addresses, but both of them have since returned to India (one of them is scheduled to move to the US soon) ). There also seems to be a high proportion of ABCDs – a large number of people seem to have emigrated in the 60s and 70s.

It seems like a large number of ABCD cousins and aunts and uncles have ended up marrying people of non-Indian origins, but it is hard to say where their spouses are. In true Kannadiga tradition, everyone has been listed by given name only (with a few initials thrown in here and there) which makes it hard to determine who is from where (talking about in-laws of the family).

Another interesting phenomenon is the strange names that have been given to people who seem to have been born in the last 10 years or so (I’m only talking of people with two Indian parents). Some people still continued to get named after Gods and other popular Indian names, but quite a few names of this generation seem to be the types that won’t be found in any Sanskrit dictionary.

I had a few other pertinent observations as I was going through the book, but I seem to have forgotten the rest. I’ll add them here if I remember any of those.

Quick Update

I heard that some of you got scared after reading my last post. My apologies for that. I’m in Bangalore now, and don’t have proper internet access here. Use my phone to check email and twitter, so I’m available on those, but there is no easy-to-use mobile tool to access wordpress so haven’t been able to update this blog.

Things will remain this way for a few more days till I get broadband (at my new house on K R Road). Regular programming won’t resume until then. I’m getting thousands of kickass ideas for kickass blog posts but with net not being available readily, I’m not able to implement too well on them.

Oh and for the record, I “do nothing” now. In the sense of job, I mean. I don’t really know what I want to do next apart from the fact that I want to live in Bangalore. Medium term plan is to become a quantitative consultant, but I need more clarity on that.

Let me know if you guys have any kickass ideas for me. Regular service will resume here in about a week’s time (or maybe later).

Cooking

I’m in the process of my weekly cooking. I’m making onion and potato sambar which should last me for about four meals – one tonight, and for three meals during the course of this week. I have been on and off the phone to my mother, as she has been giving out expert instructions from the other end of the other side (yes, this is a fighter sambar that i’m making). It’s almost done, and I’m waiting for the pressure cooker to cool down. There is a small 5 minute process to be done after that happens, and I’m good for the week.

I can’t help but think that our normal process of meal preparation (talking of india in general here) is plain inefficient. Cooking happens at least once a day, in each and every household. You have women balancing jobs, kids and at the same time tryign to find time to cook. Every day. Some people hire professional cooks, who again come once or twice a day in order to cook, and get paid a decent amount (I’m told the going rate for a Brahmin cook (yes, this market is segmented by caste) in Bangalore is Rs. 4000 a month). But then again, you need to be around when the cook arrives, occasionally supervise the cooking, and the quality of food churned out by most of these small-quantity cooks is not much higher than abysmal.

There is tremendous opportunity for economies of scale when it comes to cooking. For example, it takes exactly the same amount of effort to make 1 kilo of rice as it does to make 10 kilos of rice. It is a similar case with sambar, and rasam, and with most curries (even north indian curies) – apart from the effort involved in cutting vegetables which varies linearly with the amount of stuff to be cooked. Yet we choose to do it every day, in every house hold, sometimes up to three times a day. There is something wrong right?

There are two ways in which demand can be aggregated in order to exploit economies of scale – across days and across households. Indians in general prefer fresh food. Even after the introduction of the refrigerator a few decades back, a number of families didn’t buy one because they thought that would encourage consumption of stale food (I don’t have any such fundaes so I cook once a week). There are a number of people who insist that each meal be cooked fresh – I remember that my late father used to insist that at least rice be cooked just prior to each meal (he was ok with not-so fresh sambar, etc.).

Caste fundaes mean that eating out hasn’t traditionally been popular in India. Even nowadays, when you have a lot of people living alone, or with friends, there are very few people who eat out every meal. One look at the timings of the traditional eateries in Bangalore (MTR, Brahmin’s coffee bar, the various SLVs, Vidyarthi Bhavan) tells you a story – they are primarily breakfast and tea restaurants. MTR has recently (12 yrs back) introduced lunch nad dinner but had always been a breakfast and tea place. Most of these places would open from 7 to 11 in the morning and again from 3 to 8 in the evening.

Then there are more religious fundaes which encourage the cooking of each meal fresh – if you observe traditional people with sacred threads eat, you might observe that they do one small pooja with the rice and ghee before starting off. Would anyone want to do that with stale food? Again – similar religious fundaes have traditionally stopped people from eating out. Which is why we have the prevailing model of each meal being prepared in each household.

The problem with most restaurants in India is that they don’t serve home food. After all, they have never been the staple (i.e. every meal) source of food for people, so they have always tried to differentiate themselves from home food. The only restaurants that serve stuff that is made in a similar manner as in households are the small “messes” that operate in areas with a large concentration of single people living without family.

Going forward, I wonder if there is a market for restaurants which make food that is similar to what is made in households (of course it differs by genre, but within a genre it will be made similar to the way stuff is made in households), and which are not too expensive. They might operate on take-away or delivery model (i know that right now there are lots of tiffin-carrier providers, but they need to scale up significantly). They can exploit the economies of scale (both in terms of cost as well as effort) and provide home-like food for people who would otherwise want to keep a cook.

A good place to start this model would be areas with large concentratioon of single people, or double-income couples – something like Gurgaon. Would there be a market for someone who would provide hygienically made and tasty home-style north indian thalis at around Rs. 30 per plate? Economies of scale mean that this food is likely to be produced at a very cheap cost to the restaurant which will enable it to be priced cheap. The price point will also mean that people will eat there rather than hiring a cook to cook at home. Of course, there needs to be reasonable variety at every meal – which again means that hte restaurant should be reasonably big.

The problem with this model is it might not be feasible as a very small business. It needs to start off in a big way, serving some 1000 people every session – this is the only way enough economies of scale can be harnessed to make things cheap and also provide variety.

Assuming a couple of these start in Gurgaon and are successful, and the model spreads around the country. There is a good chance that a large section of the population will get out of the make every meal every day at every household model.

Introducing: NED Talks

I suppose a number of you have heard of TED Talks (ted.com). You might have seen it in the news recently, for it is going to come to Mysore sometime later this year. TED talks are available online (on the ted website), and are in general extremely informative and entertaining.

When TED can have talks, can NED be far behind? So I, along with Kodhi, hereby invite you to the first of the series of NED talks. The beauty of NED talks is that nothing is known yet. So far we’ve been putting NED to figure out what we are going to have as part of those talks. However, wee are confident that we won’t put NED to organize the talks themselves.

So here are a few salient features. You might notice that nothing is concrete yet, heck nothing is even the steel framework yet. I request you to add your own concrete to this, and put in your ideas.

The first of the series of NED talks is likely to be held in Bangalore in October 2009. I have picked the date randomly, and is subject to change.
The first of the series will be a day-long event. However, if registrations exceed our expectations, the event might last a whole weekend.
We have no clue what is going to be there as part of these talks. We know that it is going to be a bunch of mango people (aam junta for the uninitiated) who will be talking, but we dont’ know what they are going to be talking about. We don’t even know who are the people who are going to be talking, though I’m sure I’m going to be one of them.
If you have any bright ideas as to what we can do at the NED talks, please let us know.
NED is not rich enough to put talks on its own website, hence the videos will be put up on youtube. However, we cannot promise the same quality that the TED videos.
Please note that NED talks are only loosely inspired by TED talks, and has nothing to do with the latter. I also wish to clarify that NED talks are not a spoof of TED talks.
At the risk of repeating myself – if you have any bright ideas as to what can be done at the NED talks, plis to be cantributing.
Oh and at the risk of repeating myself again – we are really serious about organizxing the NED talks. And we promise that we won’t put NED for NED talks.