For a majority of working people, lunch means packed
food from home. And for a small number of them, it is food picked up
from home – or food made and packed in a home-like environment – and
delivered piping hot, for a fee. Welcome to the world of dabbawalas, by
no means new but endlessly appealing.
With newer
localities springing up with the promise of jobs, Chennai will see more
dabbawalas in the future. But at present, the city has a dabbawala
culture that pales next to the ones prevailing in most other
metropolises in Chennai. For instance, Chennai’s small army of
dabbawalas are no match for the legion of dabbawallas in Mumbai, where
incredible numbers of lunch boxes are picked up and delivered daily to
students, professionals and also at homes for people who can’t cook for
themselves for a variety of reasons. But, going by the steadily rising
numbers of dabbawala services, Chennai should eventually get there.
For
the Rajappas, who live at Lloyd’s Road, Royapettah, brunch comes
knocking on their door at 10.30 a.m. A delivery boy from Visalakshi
Catering Service in Mandaveli brings them fresh and hot home-made food.
It is a new menu every day. “We find this service extremely helpful
because my wife does not have to slog in the kitchen and I do not have
to wait to get parcelled food from restaurants,” says 76-year-old K.C.
Rajappa, who has availed this service for the last 10 years.
In
the last 15 years, Visalakshi Catering Service has gathered customers
in Mylapore, Alwarpet, Royapettah and Adyar, testifying to the growing
profile of the dabbawala in Chennai. “We do about 60 deliveries a day,
barring weekends. Sambar, rasam, poriyal and kootu is what we generally
serve,” says R. Krishnamurthy, who runs the service.
One
interesting aspect of dabbawala services is their flexibility. They
take on different forms, depending on the groups they are meant to
serve.
In North Chennai, it is easy to find
dabbawala service in its traditional form: men and women going from
house to house and collecting home-cooked and delivering them hot to
offices and schools by auto-rickshaws or cycle rickshaws. In Vepery, a
group of such dabbawalas has been catering to generations of students
from Agarwal Vidyalaya Matriculation Higher Secondary School.
Renuka,
Swarna, Meena, Latha and Kanchana make up this team which can be seen
carrying tiffin boxes and waiting outside the school gate, minutes
before before the gong goes off to announce the lunch hour. “When we
started the service decades ago, we earned Rs. 20 a day. Now, we make
Rs. 200,” says Kanchana, the oldest in the group. Each of the women
picks ten to twenty lunch boxes from various areas of Sowcarpet and
ferry them on autorickshaws. The women do the best they can, are prompt
and seldom absent themselves, but are unhappy about the small earnings
at the end of the day. “After paying for the autorickshaw rides – Rs.100
to ferry us up and down – we take home just Rs.3,000,” says Renuka.
Keeping in with the times, dabbawala services in the city are going online.
Anju
Mirpuri, a resident of Anna Nagar, is launching Mama Ke Dabba on July
15, but the dabbawala service, which will cater to Kilpauk, Anna Nagar
and Nungambakkam, already has a Facebook presence. “That’s the only
platform I advertised on,” she says, adding that she is happy with the
response.
Online portals is the new face of
dabbawala services and it is a face that is beginning to look attractive
to more number of people. Dinein.in, for instance, started with
deliveries in and around Nungambakkam and, today, by virtue of
increasing Internet penetration, also reaches out to customers in Besant
Nagar, Adyar and Kilpauk.
Source: http://to.ly/mjN8
