Kerala, Kerala, Kerala

Kerala is a state in south western India. It’s different from anywhere else I have been in India – and also quite different from anywhere else in the world – and it’s quite a delight.

Stepping off the plane from Mumbai, the difference was immediate. The air was fresh and clean, the airport was calm and tranquil, and people just seemed to be doing okay here. One of the most striking matters about Kerala is its government. Elected in 1957, Kerala had the first freely elected communist government in the world. The state has been more or less communist since then, and unlike most anywhere else I can think of, it has been a good thing. Kerala has the highest literacy rate in India (around 92%), is the only state with the correct male female ratio (female infanticide is a huge problem in India), has the lowest divide between rich and poor, one of the most diverse religious populations (about one third Christian, Hindu, and Muslim), good public transit, low cost health care, schools, etc., etc. etc.

It’s hard to point out why Kerala is so different – speaking to Keralans they give credence to the long history of colonization and trade – with early contact from the Portuguese, Chinese, Dutch, British and more, but most of India has had multiple colonizers over time. They give credit to the large spice industry here which has provided great wealth over centuries, but many regions in India have shipped high value goods for just as long. Many give credit to the divine – the state slogan is “God’s Own Country” - and that might just have to be enough.

The greatest part of being in Kerala thus far has been that doing research here is as easy a picking fruit off a tree. And picking fruit off a tree here is as easy as choosing what fruit you want to eat from the dozens of fruit trees everywhere, then taking it. While in Delhi I would often have to play phone tag for days to get meetings, here they have just fallen into my lap. People seem to sense what I want to talk about and tell me just the sorts of things I didn’t quite know how to ask. Then they tell me they have a friend I should talk to and set up a meeting with the friend. And so on and so on.

While quite idyllic in many ways, Kerala is currently facing many of the troubles that the West is facing. While poverty hasn’t been eliminated, disease of affluences such as hypertension and diabetes are taking the place of disease of hunger. As per usual, farmers are being pushed off land, imports are rising, packaged food is becoming a big seller and to blame is the push for convenience. At the heart of the troubles is my friend wheat.

Keralans traditionally eat a lot of fruit, fish, and rice. The local diet has just about everything you need to be healthy and strong, but many of the people who I have been speaking to over the past week or so have told me that their local diets are losing popularity with children, who are quickly growing into picky adults. The mixed blessing of being a progressive state with a disposable income has meant two working parents and enough money to eat out of serve prepared meals. Bakeries are everywhere here – on leaving a meeting with someone who had just warned me as such I happened to notice six bakeries in my first block of walking. The bakeries serve North Indian sweets and western style cakes, cookies, and muffins. Maggi noodles (ramen) which previously were unheard of are now top sellers in the corner stores and emerging super markets. Perhaps most interestingly has been seeing that while western fast food isn’t here in full force yet, Indian fast food is. Poor imitations of North Indian cuisine abound with oil soaked mains and white flour chapatti. While able to enjoy the local seafood and native type of rice in the homes of many, I have had a harder time finding either in restaurants.

Fortunately, it seems that unlike the West, Keralans seem to be interested in doing something about their problems of diet. Non-governmental and quasi-governmental organizations abound here which are trying to help save small farming, teach nutrition, and preserve the local food culture. People here are relatively well informed about their own lives – it seems that everyone is constantly reading the newspaper. (Though a huge percentage of people in the state speak English, almost everything here is written in Malayalam, the local language, first. Malayalam has the quikiest sript and pronunciation I have heard or seen. The letters are all circles of various types and the language sounds like circles of ‘la’ ‘ba’ and ‘ma’ with no breaths or breaks for words or sentences. It amazing.) People seem to authentically want what is best.

Self Help Groups, Microfinancing, Cooperatives, Umbrella NGOs, any sort of development aid you can think of is going on. The people running these organizations at least claim to be seeing a change – or at least a slowing of the somewhat inevitable effects of growth in their small state because of the work they are doing.

Parsee delights

I'll be honest. I have been a bit disappointed by much of the eating I have been doing thus far in India. I like North Indian food a lot and expected to be amazed and delighted by the restaurants and homes I would be eating in here. In Mexico I would discover gems amid the mediocre fair on a regular basis, but here I feel as if things have generally been a much narrower range. Much of the Indian food I have had has been good, some of it has been quite bad, but none of it has blown my mind – until I visited Britannia & Co.

Britannia is an adorable little lunch café which is in a district of shipping offices and naval grounds on the east side of Mumbai. Though relatively sparsely decorated in colonial style, the building had a certain charm to it. The café was opened with a 99 year lease in 1923 and has the feel that the regulars of today are the same as they were when the restaurant opened. While not flashy or expensive, the food came in large portions, delicious, savoury flavours, and with a lot of love.

The menu is a brief listing of an odd range of dishes I have never heard of. Upon sitting down, staring with a bit of wonderment at my menu, an elderly man shuffled to my table and cleared his throat softly. “Do you want to order?” He asked with a slightly off British accent. A bit startled, I picked a dish, and placed my order. Whisps of gray hair clinging to his otherwise bald head, the man shuffled off. Shortly afterward, ushered by a younger man, my sali chicken arrived. It was a steaming mound of aromatic, soft stewed chicken stew placed atop a pile of crisp potato sticks (think French’s, but fresh and much, much better). For dessert I got a caramel pudding which came with a rich, mildly burnt sauce and a smooth velvety custard.

While I ate, I watched the old man shuffled around the café, stopping occasionally to make small talk with his customers. I frequently make back stories for strangers in my head, and for once I had the opportunity to be proven right. Mr. Kohinoor made several stops at my table, and slowly released the story of his restaurant. As I guessed, he was the owner of the restaurant, and the son of the original lease holder. The other elderly fellow stooping over a cup of coffee in the rear was his brother. The smiley middle aged man behind the counter up front was his son, next in line to inherit the business. The family is Parsee (a religion of Persians kicked out of Persia in the eighth and ninth century by the incoming Muslims who have maintained relative cultural cohesiveness in Mumbai and are popularly known for their manner of disposal of bodies – feeding them to vultures so as not to taint the sacred elements of air, fire, water, or earth with the flesh of the dead). Along with his stories, Mr. Kohinoor made some cheeky some jabs at political figures in India and abroad, instructed me on how to eat it properly, chastised me for reading during a meal, asked about where I am from and where I am going, gave me advice on my travels, and (a bit creepily) suggested I check out the red light district of Mumbai.

The meal was tasty and the company was great, but the cherry on top was the napkins. Printed above the logo is the restaurant’s motto: “There is no love greater than the love of eating.” Not a phrase I would like to defend in court, but a sentiment I am quite partial to.

Overall, it was just what a dining experience should be. Quick, but not rushed. Comfortable but not casual. Kind and earnest. Low cost, but not cheap. So, what I am trying to say is that if you are ever in Mumbai and looking for a delightful meal go to Britannia Restaurant, it’s on Sprott Road in Ballard Estate. While I was in Mumbai I had a number of really great meals – and since getting to Kerala I have continued to eat quite well, but this little gem was a stand out.

The Great Dabbawalla

My time in Mumbai was brief but full. The city itself seems to be about as different as could be from, Delhi. Clean, full of sky scrapers, bustling, and largely friendly. Through a contact of a contact I was able to spend some time learning about one of the stranger aspects of Mumbai life – the dabbawalla.

The term “dabbawalla” means something close to “boxman.” The dabbawalla are an entire caste of people whose job is to transport home cooked lunches to their locations at peoples’ places of work. There are 5000, largely illiterate, dabbawallas who use a complex system of symbols and home-grown business sense to move 200,000 lunches each day. The system is near flawless (one research paper put it as one screw up in 16 million successful deliveries) and has been going for over a century. Almost all of these men hail from a small village a couple of hours outside of Mumbai and because of the small town nature of things, almost all are somehow related. The unique shape of the city and cheap train network make it affordable for this system to work here and only here. And while it’s amazing to watch these men scurry about doing their job, what I was interested in is how this amazingly Indian concept has held on as long as it has. While fast food is booming as the only option for office workers in virtually every megacity in the world, in Mumbai it is the norm to have a fresh home cooked meal every day.

The system works a bit like this (and while I use gendered terms here the system is becoming less so, again in an interesting way). Man leaves in the morning to go to work at six to accommodate for the two hour commuter train to work. He wants lunch, so his wife would have to get up at four to cook it and send it with him. Instead, in rushes the dabbawalla, making it so that she can send off the lunch at eleven to get to the office at one, giving her an extra five hours of sleep. You subscribe to the service on a monthly basis – man on a bike comes by your house to pick up your tiffin (a stainless steel box or canister which everyone uses to eat out of), he hands it off to the next fellow at the train station, who hands it off to someone at the next train, to a sorter, to another bike, to the office. A couple of hours later the dabbawalla picks up the tiffin and the whole process happens again in reverse. The average tiffin goes through the hands of five or six people in each direction. It has no writing on it besides a few grease paint marks of x’s, o’s, and squares. Depending on how far away you live from the office, you can get deliveries for between 150 and 400 rupees a month (three to ten USD).

Now, while this used to be all men receiving and women cooking, it has expanded lots over the past couple of decades. Now about a quarter of the office workers receiving lunches are women. They deliver to schools. If you want to deliver to your husband, children, brothers, sisters, and cousins, you can send tiffins to all of them. If you have no one at home to cook for you the dabbawalla have found homemakers who will be willing to cook extra meals on a subscription basis so that strangers can also have a homecooked meal and the homecooks can get a little bit of extra cash.

I am not the first or last person to marvel at this system. The whole organization organized itself (stemming from a demand during the British rule for home cooked meals that were British for British workers, then moving to Indians wanting their own food too) and incorporated during the 1960s. The three heads of the organization are former runners themselves and now give talks at major business colleges around the world on a system of organization and efficiency which came naturally to them.

Moving away from the marvel that it does work, it’s amazing to think about why people want it to work. In a city which is renown for its hustle and bustle it’s amazing to think that something as little as a home cooked meal would get this much love and care – but it’s a sign of how people are making attempts to adapt to this way of life while maintaining connections to their roots. While the moustachioed man across from me on the train to Mumbai seemed rather judgemental about most of what I am doing, he was happy to hear I would be spending time talking with the head of the dabbawallas. When I asked Mr. Moustache why he got his lunch delivered this way he said the most important part to him was the continuation of the bond with his family. While he, his wife, and his children may not eat together, they are eating the same thing. His wife knows what he likes to eat and makes it for him. If he doesn’t finish his lunch, she’ll notice and intuit that he is ill or stressed. His meal is coming from someone he loves and trusts and he knows that they are quality ingredients going into his food. It’s an interesting solution to the onslaught of the fast paced life which is overtaking India. Again and again as I continue to talk to folks, the reason I hear that everyone is eating more wheat is because they need to have convenience foods. It will be interesting to see if the dabbawalla will survive and how their business and traditions evolve as the city and the workforce continues to grow.

Overnight on the Indian Rail!

So, I took an overnight train from Delhi to Mumbai and survived (that night there were two derailments and a bombing on other trains in India - eep!). I was too big for the train beds, the food was the spiciest I have had in India, but things were relatively nice. I sat across from an excitable Indian electrical engineer who took great pleasure in telling me everything I was doing in India was wrong. I was seeing the wrong cities, I wasn't eating enough of my dinner, I came at the wrong time of year, I was talking to the wrong farmers, and on and on. He was a delight.

Upon arriving in Mumbai, I was excited to see the city is much more city-like than Delhi was. Though only here for two days, it's nice to be in such a different place. On the other hand, during my ride from the train station to my hotel I had this fun exchange with my taxi driver:

"What country are you from"
"America"
"Oh! Yes! America! America is good country."
"Yeah, I guess."
"I am glad you are not from Israel. Israel is bad country. Very baaaaaad people."

Then there was an awkward silence from me, a beaming smile from him, and he proceeded to charge me four times as much as he should have for the ride.

Odds and Ends

There are many matters which somehow have gotten passed over. They include:

In India, apparently a haircut comes with a free face, scalp, and shoulder massage. And costs two dollars. This is how life should be.

In Himachal Pradesh they have giant spiders. Seriously a foot across and long spindly legs. They made the tarantulas I saw in Mexico seem like a joke. This one was small, maybe four or five inches across (and perspective makes it look even smaller – I wasn’t getting any closer than I needed to) but they were generally just amazingly scary.

The other night I accompanied a friend into a liquor store (buying booze is a man’s affair here and she wanted some company). It was the most organized thing I have seen in India. Dozens of men filing into the store, grabbing what they wanted, throwing their money down, getting instant change, getting out. Buying alcohol is a bit frowned upon, so it’s done quick and discreetly. But the amazing part was that when we got in and found the deserted wine section we came upon some sort of angry situation where two men were yelling at this younger fellow. While perusing the wine selection, it eventually became clear that this younger man had been caught shoplifting a small bottle of whiskey. Eventually an older man came into join the other two men and began berating him. The berating turned to slapping, the slapping turned to cuffs to the ear and head punches. After a few awkward moments of this going on, one of the original men yells out to the older man “Mukesh! Stop hitting him in front of the foreigners! Wait until they are gone!” Why this is the only thing said in English when we were clearly speaking English, I don’t know. What the cops were going to do to this fellow when they showed up, I also don’t know.

I’m not sure how I somehow skipped this gem from the start of my time in India, but my first two days I was in Delhi, as I am apt to do, I was walking about the city . I ended up walking down this fairly deserted street near the train station towards this group of construction workers having their tea and taking a break. As I approach, one elbows another, and another until they are all staring at me. They begin to cat call as I approach and finally start shouting out an unintentionally hilarious mantra: “New York, New York, California, Fuck, Shit! Yes Sir, Money!” I assume these are the only words of English these men knew and chose to combine them regardless of the meaning. The continued shouting as I walked past them and until I rounded the corner. Hilariously, I eventually dead ended and had to turn back and pass this shouting gaggle of men again.

Six Months Out

My official second report detailing my fellowship life from September 5 to December 5:

As the population of India continues to grow, change has been inevitable. You can see the prospect of this growth through communal excitement and dread of the overwhelming and ongoing transformation. I have been amazed to see how much notions of progress center on food here. People speak with pride about how they can afford to eat packaged foods that they couldn’t five years ago; efforts to mandate flour fortification make front page news in The Times of India; people born with congenital amputations from fertilizer-poisoned water supplies walk the streets begging for a livelihood, knowing that their health has been the cost of increased yields. Food is an essential connection to culture here and people make it ever clear that they are invested in what they eat. India wears its stomach on its sleeve.

I spent the first two weeks of my time in India at the Navdanya organic farm. Navdanya is an organization which works to promote organic farming and fight against corporate control of agriculture in India. I chose to spend time there as a sort of agricultural antithesis to my time at CIMMYT in Mexico. While CIMMYT claims to save scores of lives from starvation, Navdanya asserts that the Green Revolution has been the principal cause of malnutrition in India and did nothing but sow seeds for further commercial exploitation of Indian farmers. Led by Vandana Shiva, a charismatic Indian woman who has been at the forefront of several legal challenges to laws regarding genetic patenting in India, the organization makes an effort to speak for the small farmer and improve the Indian diet by returning it to its roots.

I spent my first week at Navdanya in a short course examining food security in India. The next week I spent attending a conference of farmers and learning about the ancient grains which Navdanya is helping to preserve. Both provided great time to hear from people who were clearly experts in their fields – whether that meant farmers who were literally experts at what their fields needed or academics steeped in the politics and complexities of Indian nutrition, agriculture, and trade. In a short time I was introduced to the rich assortment of pseudo-cereals and millets which make up the traditional Indian diet and are fighting for shelf space against rice and wheat. It was amazing to be eating and cooking with crops I had little knowledge of previously and to hear the passion behind the defence of truly local varieties.

Navdanya is a striking foil to CIMMYT in both form and function. CIMMYT's campus is a large cluster of very 60's architecture with clean though clunky offices, manicured lawns, and trim fields. Navdanya is a small group of cow-dung buildings with thatch roofs and unruly fields of mixed-use crops. While CIMMYT looks only at corn and wheat, Navdanya grows literally thousands of crops on considerably less land. Both aim to help feed the starving masses – CIMMYT through science, Navdanya through traditional means. Though so divergent in their methods, both appeal to me in some ways. I think that both are imperfect solutions to the great problems they aim to tackle, but amazing and impassioned attempts.

Coming away from Navdanya, I couldn't help feeling skeptical of their denial of any of the benefits that came from changes made by the Green Revolution. While I certainly agree that the means by which agronomists tend to measure progress is rarely a holistic approach, I think that Navdanya's organic-only approach doesn't take in all of the practical matters either. Facts and priorities became a bit jumbled to me. How do you measure the loss of diversity against gains in production of more commercially viable commodities? Which is more important, the calorie output or the nutritional value of an acre of crops? If the government needs to subsidize one crop to provide food aid, does going with wheat reinforce imperialist tendencies toward western diets or simply go with a crop that is already a standard international commodity? The notion of what 'progress' precisely means was already muddled in my mind, but during the conversations I had with various people at Navdanya they began to abut with even more difficult concepts regarding the morality and aims of development generally.

I chose to let these ideas fester for some time and to try to get better adjusted to India through language. On the advice of some contacts at Navdanya I headed north to Mussoorie to study Hindi for two weeks. These courses taught me little more than the basics of grammar, but provided needed insight to how Indian communication works and gave some more cultural background. Understanding Hindi has helped me understand Indian English much better. Additionally, gaining the ability to ask the essentials ('What is this?' 'How much is that?') has helped me get a needed edge when beginning conversations. Simply being able to read some signs or menus has been of great comfort.

From Mussoorie I worked my way west, passing through Chandigarh, the only planned city in India. Chandigarh is lauded as a symbol of the great rise of development in India – but likely not in the way the government intends it to be. It serves as an ironic metaphor of progress in India – well organized streets in a perfect grid, a great public transit system, and enormous shopping complexes in planned commercial districts – all of which look like nobody knew what to do with after their construction and have begun to literally fall apart. While initially considering staying in the city for some time to take cooking courses there, after seeing the state of the city, I opted to move along.

I worked my way towards the farm of Ramesh, a man who has recently begun an organic farm and education center south of Dharamsala. I spent two weeks at Ramesh's farm learning about the work he is doing, meeting farmers in the village he lives in, baking with his local variety of wheat, and the challenges of farming in these barren hills. Working with someone who is trying to address the problems of agricultural poverty on a very local level was a fascinating opportunity to hear some predigested thoughts on the changes taking place in India.

I moved down to Delhi four weeks ago to get a taste for the big city and help figure out how the changes in agriculture which I had observed up North are altering the dietary habits of the whole of the country. By talking to a wide variety of contacts, the tangled web of what Indians are eating and why has continued to become more complicated. Talking to folks from Navdanya and Slow Food I hear about the great loss of culinary diversity and the rising unsustainability of current farming practices. Speaking with people at the Rice Wheat Consortium I have learned about their claimed successes of the Green Revolution and their future plans to help save humanity from mass starvation. The Ministry of Food Processing Industries has sung the praises for recent great improvements in farming and for the potential for commercial food growth in India. Factory owners tell me the government's enormous bureaucracy and nepotism prevents any sort of domestic growth in industry. Street vendors complain of recent government crackdowns on the previously unregulated industry. Everyone complains that you can't find a decent restaurant at a reasonable price and that new supermarkets are more glam than substantive improvement in hygiene. And the list goes on.

Delhi, seemingly like much of India, is a city which is constantly trying to figure out which direction it is going. Depending on who you talk to either change is coming on at breakneck speeds or it has been falsely promised for decades and will likely never be delivered beyond superficial improvements. For all the people I have spoken to about the state of Indian diet and agriculture, I still don't know what's going on, but I have been blessed with an astounding variety of forecasts. Because of the great diversity of people who I have spoken to, and the sheer enormity of this nation, I have become hopelessly confused - in a good way. The questions I ask do not deserve simple answers and I am glad not to have found them.

While my research here has been excellent, I have to admit I don't especially like being in India, which is funny. I have always wanted to come here, with no specific expectations or reasoning; just a general wonderment for a culture so different from my own and a hearty appreciation of the food. However, I am not sure if I have ever been in a place more confusing in my life. My arrival in India was rough. It took four drivers to get me to my hotel from the airport. Each told me that my hotel had burned down or been knocked down by the government and tried to deliver me to another guest house where they would receive a commission. My first two days in Delhi were full of similar incidents and they have continued off and on during my travels. It has gotten to the point where I feel less and less saddened each time another person tries to take advantage of me and just resigned. I feel disappointed in myself at becoming hardened.

I have been really surprised how difficult it has been for me to adjust to the culture here. Generally, I have had a tough time having authentic interactions with people – all of my informal conversations seem to be only a build up for a proposed fiscal interaction. I have had difficulty adjusting to India's sliding scale – time, distances, prices, or facts need not be precise or even reasonable estimates – any answer is seen as better than none. I have had a really hard time trying to wrap my head around the rigid boundaries of race, sex, class, and caste and the deplorable treatment that others receive to my benefit. Because of these factors I frequently feel uncomfortable and frustrated - sometimes in a manner where I think I am learning from it - sometimes not.

When I encounter expats or other travelers and relate my woes they nod sympathetically and press books upon me as if they were prescriptions. These India focused auto-biographical accounts, histories, and religious tomes flesh out the country bit by bit but seem to only address the symptoms, not the underlying cause of my melancholy. Similarly, as my bowels try to adjust to the country, I try a little of what everyone says will be the solution to my belly trouble – pills, potions, and special food – but nothing except time seems to do the trick. In the process, I lose a day or two every week, bound to my bathroom waiting for whatever has recently taken a hold of my gut to release me.

Despite my continued confusion about the culture here, the slow going and constant hurdles, the hectic pace, and the troubled health, I am learning bundles about the shift in consumption and growth patterns of food products which are taking place here. Soon, I head south to what I have been told is a very different sort of India. While oftentimes wearisome, my time in the North has been filled with many opportunities for learning. I hope with my move I will continue to be able to flesh out the many mysteries of what is feeding the subcontinent fed.

24-Hour Development

The word on everyone's lips in India is 'development.' India is big, India likes being big, and India wants to be bigger. There are an amazing number of signs and posters which the government posts around bragging that India is 'Number one in ____" or "India produces __% of the world's _____!" Nationalism takes on a really different feel here, but there are flags a plenty, pride in Ghandi is near universal, and an appreciation of India is easy to find.

Perhaps the strongest showing of this Indian loving fervor was that I have observed was at the Indian International Trade Fair. One of my contacts here, an Italian woman named Sabilla who is working with Navdanya, mentioned in passing that the trade show was going on - and it just so happened that this year's focus topic is Food Processing and Agriculture. Big-time jackpot on the weird collection of information lottery.

I paid my first visit to the fair on Saturday and was initially amazed by the crowds. It is hard to communicate that there are crowds everywhere in India. With a billion people, there simply isn't enough space for there to be places without people - you walk down any street, especially in Delhi, and you will see throngs of people. Every street looks like it is the busy street. While I expected there to be people at a trade fair, I didn't expect anything near what I found. Hordes of people - but most astonishingly, lots of teenage boys meandering about and staring at dioramas about how the bee industry in Bihar is growing.

The fare itself had an amazing array of displays. The whole thing spills over an expansive series of buildings and fails to follow any sort of logical order. A display on traditional carving was right beside a display selling back-massagers (As Seen On TV); A woman working a hand loom as a "live demonstration" was placed beside a man working on a standard sewing machine, beside a man sitting at a computer terminal while a pool-table sized machine placed sequins on a piece of cloth. Anything which could be made, bought, sold, or traded in, by, or around India is here.

Each state was awarded its own hall for peddlers to hawk their wares and for the state government to brag about just what they were doing for food processing in India. More importantly, the Ministry of Food Processing Industries had a hall all to their own to sell foreign investors on the opportunities which are available in India. It seems that down is up and left is right - everyone is still trying to figure out just what is going on in this mixed up world of fast-paced growth. As am I - more to come.