Prices

The Times of India I read on the flight to Bangalore discussed price spikes of onions.  The Star of Mysore I read on arrival in Mysore talked about increased price of vegetables.  They were all close to Rs. 100 per kg.   I bought some oranges and mosambies at Rs. 100 a kg each.   You get about 4 of each for half kg, meaning each fruit is about Rs. 12.50.

Later that evening I was in a department store A to Z.  It is modeled on department stores in the west, albeit in a much smaller space, and carries everything from soaps to packaged snacks to groceries.  I observed with interest familiar brands like Oreos, KitKat, and Knorr soup concentrates.   An Oreo packet with about a dozen of the well-loved cookies was Rs. 20.  KitKat had smaller sizes to suit varied budgets in India (exemplified in articles and books like ‘fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’).  The typical size that costs 50 cents in the US cost Rs. 20, a packet half that cost Rs. 10, and a packet half that cost Rs. 5.  This meant that a maidservant’s daughter could probably afford a KitKat treat at times.  That's good.

It also meant that a KitKat indulgence was more affordable than an orange or mosambi indulgence.  A Knorr soup concentrate packet was Rs. 52 (with multiple vegetables, onions and tomatoes in concentrate form), the price of half a kg of one vegetable.

This was a real change.  When I was growing up, an orange was probably 25 paise, while a Cadbury bar was Rs 5.  Chocolates were expensive and out of reach.  Everybody bought vegetables and fruits for everyday use, and chocolates on rare occasions (maidservants not at all).  While fruits and vegetables (along with salaries) have gone up 50 to 100 times or more, chocolates seem to have gone up only by 4-5 times.  This seemed to similar to the situation in the US.  (I had been extremely surprised when I landed in the US to find chocolate prices on par with vegetable and fruit prices and the more processed food it was, the cheaper it seemed to be. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that the poor are obese rather than being thin as sticks, and cheap processed food was one of the reasons.)  

Everything in India has gone up.   But processed and packaged foods seemed to be holding their own.  Is it because of efficiencies in production?  And that it is easier to maintain packaged foods when compared to fresh foods?  That is the explanation in the US.  But in India vegetables and fruits are local, don’t have to travel from afar, and don’t have to be preserved for a long time.  This is puzzling.  Was Cadbury that expensive when I was growing up because there was no competition, or are they keeping the prices low now because of efficiencies in production?

The impact of the high prices for pulses and vegetables is obvious when you order dosas at any small hotel – the sambhar has no toor dal, no vegetables.  It has some onions and tomatoes, occasionally potatoes, and I don’t know what is used to thicken the gravy.  The rava dosa price at these hotels has not gone up – a special rava masala dosa is still Rs. 45.   Is it the competition keeping prices down (there are tons of eating places of this kind) and they have to manage their margins by using less and less dal and vegetables?

First Impressions

This will likely read like fluffy and superficial to some, with the tone of a visiting NRI.  But I believe First Impressions have value, denoting the initial reaction to things we see and the people we meet (and of course, immortalized by my favorite Jane Austen).

By the time we travelled the distance from Bangalore airport to Mysore road, from outside the northern tip of the city to the south, I was tired of the traffic.  It was fairly early in the morning (around 7.00am), but the bustling and teeming roads seemed already full.  I was happy to think of Mysore, happy that it was a smaller city, and happy that I didn’t live in Bangalore and did not plan to do so in the future.

The Bangalore-Mysore highway was also very busy, and the road bumps meant many slowing downs and picking up speeds.   As always the highway was lined with plenty of eating establishments.  The smaller road side establishments were still visible, but more visible were larger, newer, establishments. One was a nice vegetarian restaurant called ‘Adigas’ proudly proclaiming that they were part a chain.  (What surprised me most was the ‘we are hiring’ sign out front looking for everyone from cooks to dishwashers in a new branch they were opening somewhere.  Surely finding people, especially unskilled workers, required practically no advertisement – didn’t the workers at existing branches have relatives they were desperate to get hired?  Also, the sign was in English.)  Most other newer establishments included ‘wine’ and ‘bar’ in their signboards.   There were also wine shops which I am going to guess sell alcohol (not just wine). 

As we got close to Mysore, huge billboards advertised a variety of luxury accommodations, appealing eating places, and jewellery stores.  After we got home to Kuvempunagar and made trips to shops as we got settled in, some of these themes were obvious.  Wine (alcohol), umpteen eating places, jewellery stores, a new store selling meat, lots of new bakeries (selling decent looking cakes in addition to the traditional vegetable puffs and sweets) summed up the businesses that thrived in Kuvempunagar.  All of this does indicate wealth and changing patterns of spending.   I think I was most surprised by the number of jewellery shops, all within a few blocks of Kuvempunagar.

We had dinner at a local small restaurant, with crisp rava onion dosas and Indo-chinese food on the menu.  Yummm.   There was what looked to be a head waiter, several junior waiters, and low down the totem pole, the table cleaners.  They took dirty plates away and cleaned tables, but only the waiters served food.   As has universally been the case the table cleaners are young.  The boy who cleaned our table would have been in class IX or X, if he had been in school.   He was probably from a nearby village, and had to drop out of school or was forced out.  To my eyes he was sad and tired, and clearly at the bottom of the hierarchy at the restaurant.  The tip was pocketed by the waiter, and we had no easy way to tip the table cleaner.  As I was leaving India after my last trip a year ago, I had eaten at a restaurant in Bangalore where the table cleaner was about 10 or 11.  In spite of everything including the Right to Education Act, the meal I had when I left and the meal I had when I came back had this in common with my restaurant meals growing up - young, overworked, underpaid table cleaners.  And this is in Bangalore and Mysore, two relatively well-to-do cities.

 

However prosperous Mysore becomes, the lower ranks seemed to be always filled in with people ready to do any job.  Though some people had probably climbed into the lower middle, middle middle, and upper middle classes and were frequenting the jewellery shops and bakeries and wine shops it did not translate to job vacancies at the lowest levels – people just came in droves from around to fill them up.  I don’t hear of any difficulties in middle class homes finding maid servants.  I doubt the restaurant has any trouble finding table cleaners (notwithstanding the ‘we are hiring’ sign at Adigas).  And, there seems to be always people in temporary blue tarp tents – I have not yet figured out what these migrant workers do.  The blue tarps are around in vacant lots (mostly public) for a few days/weeks and then they disappear.  One year I heard they were digging ditches for fibre-optic cables.

India 2014

At the suggestion of a friend, I decided to capture experiences from my visit to India in writing, as a blog.  I intend to share this only a small group of family and friends.   Some of my observations might come across as naive and inexperienced to folks who live in India; however, my experiences are valuable to me, and perhaps of interest to the small group I intend to send this to.

And I enjoy the writing.