Sure, but that wouldn’t negate a lifetime of “tremendous suspicion regarding food that has been stored for any length of time, particularly in a refrigerator”.
No, why would you think so? Did you read everything that was in that post?
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The adoption of electricity and appliances like refrigerators has been a slow one over generations. The Indians you know now in America will be far more accustomed to them than their parents or grandparents.
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When you immigrate from one country to another, there are some huge changes in your life and some level of practicality applies to certain things. Traditions that are easier to maintain are more easily kept. If you don’t have the experience of immigrating from one society to a very different society, you might not be able to understand the degree of adjustment that is demanded.
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For middle-class Indians who have never been in America, all they know is America is a place where you can get a good job, make a lot of money, get a big house, and several cars. What they have no idea about is how much their lives change in terms of how much time they have to do things. Work culture is vastly different. India is a place where you can schedule a meeting for 1 p.m. and the first person doesn’t show up until 3:30 p.m. Indians who come here have to adjust very fast to a very different way of living.
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People in their 20s adjust to some kinds of things a lot easier than older people. Furthermore, if you are living in a traditional household in India, you are quite likely to be living with your parents or in-laws and their parents too. And the details of how life works are decided at a level one or two generations above you—what you eat, when you eat, how food is bought, prepared, and stored, etc. Emigrating to America and suddenly finding yourself the decision maker in your own house balancing a degree of routine chores and errands that you never had to do before can make you re-prioritize radically.
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Did you notice the disclaimer I made about younger people and changes in society?
Hmm does anyone know what is the error rate on deliveries?
From the Perennial Palate link:
That’s pretty good, considering newspaper deliveries here in Finland aim for an error rate of 1 in 2000.
As far as I can tell, Dabbawallahs are really only a cultural institution in Bombay. I understand they exist elsewhere in India, but given Ascenray’s observations regarding Indian culture & food - one must wonder, why aren’t Dabbawallahs a significant institution in Calcutta or Madras or Delhi too?
The wiki article claims miniscule error rates–once in every 4 or 8 million deliveries.
At first , I was astounded…After all, no pizza place in America is that accurate, even with computers.
And dabbawalas are mostly illiterate.
But watching the short video in this thread, I realized that it isnt all that difficult.
There are 4500 dabbawala, who deliver 200,000 meals…that’s 44 deliveries per person. But, if I understand it, the system actually uses 3 workers for each meal delivered.
(One guy rides his bicycle to the homes and picks up the meals. another guy sorts all 44 meals on a crate, can carries it on his head to a train station, and at the destination a third guy picks up the crate and rides his bicycle to deliver each meal to its owner.) So there is 3 times the work load. and 3x44 = 132
So each worker has to handle 132 lunch boxes.
Now , personally, I would screw that up. And so would the kid who works at my local pizza parlor.
But it’s really not that hard. Illiterate people have better memories than us modern,western “ejukated stoodents.” And they use color codes and simple marks to assist their memory.
And most of the delivery routes are the same , to the same people, every day.
Now, I have another question: in America, there used to be milkmen who delivered milk fresh every day, entering the home where women were alone while their husbands were at work.
And there used to be lots of jokes (and juicy rumors) about illicit romances, etc.
Is there a similar situation in India?
Or what about, say, stories of dabbawalas tasting some of the food they deliver?
We have those here, except they’re called “interns” and aren’t paid at all.
I never heard of this until now, but am amazed at how different this systems work in India and work well (well sort of).
The airline lost my luggage on the way in. They have an elaborate system for when this happens. There are log bogs, posters, stamps (multiple ones), carbon paper and what not. We actually got PAID for our lost luggage (which wasn’t really lost, but delayed). After filling out paper in a book that looked like it was a spell book in a Harry Potter movie - we had to pick out pics that resembled our luggage - which then was matched to a poster - and a specific column to determine how much compensation we got. They had it the next day.
Want to get a cab from the airport - this involves multiple people:
- The guy at a ticket counter who gives you a slip of paper
- The guy on a chair outside
- The driver asleep in the backseat
- The guy the driver gives the ticket to after we drove maybe 100 yards - who simply put a slight tear in the ticket and handed it back
- Oh - and the other driver who then gets in the car while the first driver disappears
Many times you think “I’m fucked” - and you totally would be in the US. But they have their own way of doing things. On the way back - I was forced to check my camera bag at a layover at Heathrow. This had over $2k in camera equipment. I was worried they’d lose it - and they did (I didn’t have to check on the way in - so the first time I lost my luggage - it was mainly cheap clothing - which they found anyway). They did lose it. I called a few times and they had no record of anything. I was pretty tired and didn’t bother fighting anything as it appeared I didn’t have much legal stand in and they were fairly limited in what they would have to give me.
Three weeks later - FedEx is at my door with a box that looked like it had been through a war zone. Sure enough - everything was there.
I can’t say that everything in India went as smoothly as the Dabbawalas - as it appeared that Air India had a 100% error rate (but also corrected both).
I’m glad for this post - fascinating stuff.
As a person of Indian origin, I agree with everything Acsenray said. Dabbawalas are like Mohawk Iron workers of New York : pretty neat, pretty impressive but pretty localized and specialized.
I wanted to add something to Arsenray’s observations and that is the variation of food itself in India - due to geographic reasons. First - India is a tropical country, so fruits/vegetables/crops were/are grown throughout the year and hence available for consumption compared to say many of the European / American cuisines where the winter means meat pretty much. Here are some other differences :
1> There are different grains (staple foods) grown in different parts of India because of the climate. In the south and the east, its predominantly rice. In the north and the west - its predominantly wheat and corn.
While bread made from wheat, can survive without refrigeration in a dabba for hours, rice usually cannot. It is common practice to make rice fresh everyday.
2> People living near water bodies (usually but not always) consume fish (not always seafood but fish) - (the southern states, the western coast, east india, …) and this is not amenable to dabbas too. A tropical lake produces a lot more fish.
3> Homemade yogurt is a typical item consumed with lunch in the north, south and the west. Again not very amenable to dabbas.
4> The food in many parts of India is fermented (like fermented rice crepes - Dosas in the south)… same as above.
Also worth mentioning - all big Indian / multinational companies in India provide subsidized or free food at their locations which are usually in big cities. (I saw this in Italy too) Also, the big cities are very cosmopolitan, so people eat a wide variety of foods.
I have been an intern or worked with interns almost yearly since the late 1980s. They are nowhere close to being as useful as a peon.
I don’t know about other cities, but what I have seen in Calcutta is that a lot of people take a long lunch from say 1-3 and go home for a meal and a nap. Calcutta is much more compact geographically than Bombay so it’s easier to do that. Also, some people start work a bit late, say 10:30 or 11 so they have their main meal early, before work, kind of like brunch.
I came in to mention this one—it’s what happens when a lunchbox delivery does go wrong and the lunch a woman lovingly makes for her husband goes to a complete stranger. It’s really great. I had no idea about the lunchbox delivery service till then. So cool.
I’m curious as to HOW the system routes packages (FedEx and United Airlines, listen up).
Closeups of the packages suggest smudgy letters, numbers or symbols, but I can’t make them out. Colors could be useful, but how can you route 132 packages using only colors? If you have a new customer on a route, how do you tell the delivery/pickup person the new address in a big city without literacy? Do they memorize every address?
Acsenray, can you describe the routing system in detail?
No, I have no knowledge of how it works. I can ask around and see if I can get more info.
They have a simple label to identify origin, destination and route.
Here’s a pic explaining the code.
In addition to the food-based reasons, it’s also a function of the way Mumbai is laid out. Because of the shape of the underlying peninsula (which is not entirely natural), everything is in sort of a straight line (including the rail line). That means you don’t have to load tiffins onto 50 trains to serve the whole city; you just need one going northeast from Churchgate and one or two going southwest. Contrast this to delivering pizza boxes from 40 Pizza Huts spread across a city.
My mother used to get tiffin lunches at medical school from my grandmother in Pune. It’s an entirely different city more than 100 miles from central Mumbai.
Dabawallahs are a unique and magical institution. Nothing else in India is reliable.
Thank you so much for the contributions to this thread. I feel I understand this amazing organization so much better, plus the reasons why it is needed and wanted in Mumbai. Thanks especially to Ascenray. 
Well, I could be wrong about details. I didn’t actually ever live in India.
Another thing about Bombay is that it’s the country’s most diverse city with the most diverse white collar workplaces. That would make it more difficult for individuals to be assured that anything except food from home met their preferences, budget, and food restrictions.
It looks like quite a bit of training and memorization is needed to interpret that. Maybe it’s like the London cabbies, who learn every street and have a map in their head.
The dabbawalas are indeed fascinating and have been a system of study by some major business schools.
Another job that I have found quite amazing in India, is that of the ‘dhobi’ or washerman. There numbers are now declining in the metropolises with the advent of washing machines, but they still exist in other places.
These people live as a community, generally somewhere close to some source of water like a river or a lake.
Every household has their own ‘dhobi’ family. One of the male members of the family will pick up the clothes from your house. This man will then go to several different homes and collect their clothes as well. All the clothes from all the homes, for all the dhobis get washed and dried on common clothes lines. And a week later, your clothes land up at your home, all washed, starched, ironed and folded. Very rarely have I seen the wrong clothes delivered to the wrong house.
The amazing part is that, all they do to identify clothes from your house is to put a small indelible ink mark of a size about 3 mm square, in a place that is usually not visible, like the inside of the pockets of trousers, the inside collar of a shirt etc. It looks more like a hieroglyphic alphabet. I could never figure out, how that little mark helps them as if it was a bar code.