Apu’s World

I talk to my mother almost everyday, and on every one of those calls, she will ask me what I am eating/have eaten/plan to eat for lunch/dinner, depending on the time of day when we talk. I may go adventurous for dinner and choose from rotis, pasta, noodles, soups, salads or any number of eating out options but lunch follows a regular and monotonous pattern : rice (tomato/coconut rice if I am in the mood), a dal or sambar, a vegetable and curd. Despite this, my mother will want to know what the menu for the day was.

(source: http://getaway2india.wordpress.com)

We are Indians, you see. Food is how we show love and affection. Food as in: talking about food, asking the other person if (s)he has eaten, pressing the person to eat until they burst, packing up leftovers for people to take and of course, complaining that they eat too little. Never mind if the mound of rice on that banana leaf is as high as a mini Kanchenjunga.

Food is the glue that brings us together. I am yet to go a party in India where the hosts are not left with copious amounts of leftovers. Food that would have satisfied a marauding army must be available, regardless of the size of the crowd.

Food is memory, and memories that are unique to every family; delicious memories that leave the mouth watering and the heart tingling, years after one has left home. World travellers and gourmets will still remember that one taste which can never be found elsewhere. For me, it is my mother’s vegetable pulao, topped with pieces of fried bread. Not only have I never eaten this style elsewhere, I am convinced that even if someone else tried it out, it would never be the same. My mother claims to have no secret ingredients, but I cannot bring myself to believe it. Mostly, I refuse to cook pulao, unable to bear eating something that is not the same as the original.

Food is custom. Curd rice follows rasam saadam which in turn follows sambar saadam. There is a comfort in this dull routine that will soon be wholly unfamiliar to an entire generation of children reared on cosmopolitan eating.

Food is celebration made ritual. Kozhakattai for Vinayaka Chaturthi, Seedai and rava laddu for Janmashtami, Sundal for Navaratri. Kaju katli and Jalebi may taste as good but they cannot give me quite the same thing as the adirasam my grandmother used to make for Deepavali.

In my younger years, along with my sisters, I enjoyed making fun of what I saw as older women’s obsession with food. Now, as my grandmother grows old and frail and can no longer make adirasam, I feel the loss of something more than just food. New age gurus like Michael Pollan tell us what we in India have perhaps always known : that food is much more than just the sum of its parts.

I see myself becoming more like my mother than I thought I would, and am no longer embarrassed at talking about food, or the making of it. So, don’t be surprised when I ask you, are you cooking/eating something special for New Year’s? And if so, what is it?

A very Happy New Year to all of you, and see you in 2010.

apu In General

Over at Escape from Cubicle Nation, one of my favourite business blogs, Pam Slim has been doing a series of ‘The Price is Right’ interviews (audio) with various entrepreneurs, and covering some interesting topics such as moving from free to paid and identifying the right price for your market. It’s given me a lot of food for thought, and I notice that I’ve been paying more attention to pricing than I did before. As I’ve mentioned earlier, pricing is one of the hardest things I face as an entrepreneur, and sometimes, that means I decide on an arbitrary price and avoid thinking too much about it

Anyways, the increased attention to pricing also means that I’ve been noticing it in ordinary transactions/ interactions that I go through, as a consumer. Recently, I’ve been thinking about visiting my sisters, both of whom live in the US of A - so it seemed like a good idea to check out what air fares and travel deals might be like.

Almost all deals I’ve come across seem to be for group tours - and this is the funny thing - they don’t seem like deals at all! Thomas Cook for instance, prices a 14 day US holiday starting at Rs. 86000 + USD 2975, and most other packages seem to be in the same league. (Note the clever use of Rs. 86000 + USD 2975 - effectively this works out to almost Rs. 200,000 but then, USD 2975 seems like a smaller number!)

Airfares for individual travellers are about Rs. 60,000 return to most American cities, and one can get a reasonable US hotel for $100 per day (that’s approximately another Rs. 75,000 for 14 days, and that’s for 2 people) - so Rs. 200,000 still seems like a lot of money considering that many expenses will be lower when divided among a group of people. (No doubt, Thomas Cook will be getting much, much lower rates from hotels, cruises, local buses, restaurents and so on). In fact, I think that group tours ought to be cheaper than independent travel.

To my mind, group tours have a number of disadvantages - things are pre-planned, you can’t spend more time at a place if it interests you and god help you if you find the group you are stuck with annoying or just not your type. What’s interesting is that Thomas Cook (and presumably other tour operators) are willing to get people to pay higher prices than they should otherwise, and this tell us something about how there is no one “right price” but simply a price that is right for a particular consumer.

Among some of the reasons why people might pay a premium for a group tour that offers little independence or flexibility -

- Everything is taken care of - for those who haven’t travelled abroad before or are unfamiliar with English, or for older people unused to planning over the Internet, this can be a big plus.
- Indian meals - again, particularly important for vegetarians and Jain vegetarians (which explains why Gujaratis are a big part of the group tour circuit)
- Safety - no worries about landing up in a ‘bad’ part of town/getting lost etc.

apu Entrepreneurship, Travel Tales

Does the headline from this article in the Telegraph, UK, “Cherie Blair brings ‘new culture’ to aspiring businesswomen of India” strike anyone else as unnecessarily patronising? (Terms like ‘white man’s burden’ and ‘bringing the light to the natives’ come to mind quite easily).

Of course, one doesn’t blame the Asian Women of Achievement (AWA) Awards team for the ludicrous headline that the newspaper chose to adopt. Still, I am curious as to what exactly Cherie Blair, a patron for the awards, meant when she says, “I gather, actually, that there are awards [in India], but they are not the same as a Pinky award, because if you have got a Pinky award it’s seriously researched and seriously peer-judged, and you are up against great competition – not somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody else. That’s the culture we want to bring over to Mumbai.”

For starters, there is some serious generalisation and condescension happening there. Yes, some awards in India may not exactly be thoroughly researched, some may involve nepotism, some may even involve money changing hands. But to tar all of them with the same brush and assume that Indian industry has no history of professionally done awards is a case of some big-time looking down the nose (and without one’s glasses too).

And to imply claim that they will bring it to Mumbai; well, I suppose hubris knows no limits. If I seem irked, it is because I am - how terrible to bring in an award that proposes to support women, and then do it in such a patronising manner. This is not an example of women’s solidarity; rather, it is a classic example of the We will teach you what you need to know manner that irks activists in non-Western countries.

Blair’s comment made me very keen to find out what exactly the AWA award process is, so I hopped over to the AWA website, which gives you on the process - exactly nothing. The nomination form (PDF) tells you briefly who is eligible, but about the judging process - zilch. Now, of course, I’m not saying they are not seriously researched and seriously peer-judged , but while looking down their noses at local awards, they might consider actually detailing their own process on the website.

And of course, they could also go look at TiE’s Stree Shakti awards, which do indeed mention how they go about it.

(Also, I seem to have missed linking to this - the 8th Carnival of Feminists is up here, with a lot of stuff specifically on young women and young feminists).

apu Entrepreneurship, Women & Feminism