Click on the heading for link to the full post in Google Earth Community.
The dabbawallas of Mumbai, an unique institution in this city, gather here in spacious vacant areas, such as this sidewalk, to exchange the food tiffins they have brought from thousands of homes in the suburbs of Mumbai, so home cooked food (many Indian homemakers still remain home, enabling them to send fresh home cooked food to their husbands at work) is reached, daily on work days, to your place of work and well in time for your lunchbreak!!!
Here, and in many more similar places, the 'exchange' takes place so your dabba(tiffin) is transferred to the right dabbawalla(tiffin carier), whose area of delivery includes your office!!!
Its hard to imagine this: thousands of sealed food tiffins, three or four deeply rounded aliminium boxes closed with a cover on each, and inserted into a deep round box which is also sealed, are picked by by your dabbawalla, from your home at around 10.00 a.m. and delivered to you at your office, by around 12:30 a.m. And, never, never, is a wrong dabba placed before you.............woe unto the gods that be!! A south Indian Hindu vegetarian would shudder to open the wrong tiffin and find spicy meat/chicken cooked for a Punjabi or Goan!!!........................
to view the dabbawallas in action go to the Churchgate station, west of Hutatma Chowk (Flora Fountain); you will find them accounting and exchanging dabbas(tiffins-see pictures) ( at or after 11:30 a.m.) on the sidewalk opposite the station and below the Western Railway offices which is a Victorian-Gothic building in black stone.
Facts on Mumbai/Bombay: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai
No comments:
Post a Comment