Karim’s

It’s the breathless refrain every expat asks every other expat in Delhi: “You haven’t been to Karim’s yet?!?”

The unmarked alley entrance means you’ll never stumble upon it. This is the allure of Karim’s: to go there is to discover a secret of the old city.

Some people will tell you it’s the oldest restaurant in Delhi. Other people will tell you that they invented Mughal-style food. The truth doesn’t really matter. Only the food does.

You don’t know what to look at first — the kebab guys, the bread guys, the guys carrying more dishes than seems possible, the motorcycles honking as they weave through what you’d think was the middle of the restaurant, or the proprietors of each of the four dining rooms who, inexplicably, appear to be in competition with each other for your patronage.

Every time we go, we learn a new secret. Last time we learned that the Karim’s Veg dish, with paneer, dates, and some sort of nut-based gravy, is the stuff of dreams. The time before that, we learned that they serve breakfast. This time we learned that the half-inch of oil puddled atop every bowl of stew isn’t supposed to be eaten. It’s there to show you that the food has been cooked so well that the fat has liquefied; the fat itself is meant to be drained into a separate dish.

Our parents are coming in November to visit. In the days they spend with us before embarking on their packaged tour, we’ll make sure they know this secret of the old city; and when they meet up with the rest of their tour group, they’ll be the ones breathlessly asking, “You haven’t been to Karim’s yet?!?”

the craziest sight on the road #4

The tow truck had an obvious design flaw: its boom barely extended past its bumper. The chains it was using to tow the car were good at transferring the truck’s accelerating force to the car, but useless for transferring deceleration — when the truck slowed, the chains would go slack, and the car being towed would crunch into the truck’s bumper well before the chains went taught again. That’s why most tow trucks have either long booms or pieces of rigid metal to transfer the truck’s decelerating force to the car.

But metal is expensive here. And people are cheaper. Which gives us the craziest sight on the road #4: two men, each with one foot on the back of the tow truck and the other on the hood of the car. Human pieces of rigid metal, standing on both vehicles as the truck rumbles down the street, centered above the void, employed solely for the ability of their leg muscles to transfer the deceleration of the first vehicle to the second.

These men held the truck’s boom in a death grip. Should the tow truck slow too fast, they had no men standing on THEIR shoulders to keep them from crunching into the tow truck’s cab.

ceiling fan at Karim’s

Old Delhi at night

Just south of Jama Masjid, this is old Delhi: auto rickshaws and bicycle rickshaws and cars and scooters and people and lights and ads and noise. And above it all, a chaos of wires and pipes and dead kites dangling. Looks best if you see the bigger image.

coconut rava rave

Truly an eating paradise.

waiting

My drive to work takes me underneath the NH-8 highway in Gurgaon. Traffic on this cantilevered behemoth flows by on cement pillars, toll-paying drivers unaware of the ground-level chaos that segregated from their smooth ride above: cars and rickshaws and cycles and traffic cops and homeless migrants jostling for space and passage and attention, everyone in a hurry and nobody moving at all.

In the cumulative hours I’ve sat at this eternal intersection, I’ve memorized the scene. I know the ripped circus posters; I know the cops with their Rajasthani mustaches curled up their cheeks; and I know the people who call the weedy median home: the old men, the tired women, the energetic children, the girl with the full-length skirt smeared with dirt but not enough dirt to hide the vibrant mustard yellow of the material.

We all share the same daily ritual: I sit in my car, the cops wave at us to wait or wave at us to go, the engines idle, the rickshaws weave through the cars; and the migrants sit and stare or walk through traffic and beg.

Last Wednesday, some new people joined the ritual: a woman, her naked son, and her battered suitcase.

She had the look of a person in transit. Her pale blue outfit shone through the dust that engulfed her suitcase completely. Squatted on the cement wall of the median, she was clearly waiting for someone. Her face spoke anticipation and excitement and even her son, young as he was, seemed to share. His posture was stunning: he sat straight up, a naked three-year-old with the manner of a guard at Buckingham Palace.

I wondered about her as I drove slowly past. What was she waiting for — A bus? A bike? Her taxi-driving son, making it big in the big city? – and how long would she be waiting? I imagined sitting on a pre-arranged corner at a pre-arranged date, waiting for someone, with no mobile to call my ride and no magazine to kill the time, far from home, with no way to know if the ride would be late and nowhere to go if the ride didn’t show. I have forgotten life before cell phones.

Seven hours later, there she was. Still.

I was returning from a celebratory lunch with my boss and my partner. Our bellies were full of what had been their first taste of sushi. Her face hit me. Her face jolted me.

It was the face of a person who’d been squatting in dust and exhaust for seven straight hours. She looked miserable. Her son drooped next to her, a flower that hadn’t been watered. I don’t think she’d moved. How could she had moved? I wouldn’t have moved. If she’d moved, she’d always wonder: had her ride came while she was gone?

The next morning, there she was. Still.

“do one thing”

It has taken me a journey of thirty-one years and 7,700 miles from my birthplace to discover the single most powerful phrase in the English language. I did not learn it in the thousands of books I’ve read, through the thousands of hours of television I’ve watched, or from a loinclothed guru high in the Himalayas. No: the most powerful phrase in the English language is in common use in nearly every meeting, every debate, every exchange of ideas in India.

“Do one thing.”

You cannot dilute the power of these words — no matter how many times you hear it in the same meeting. Forty-five minutes of debate over whether the headline should be set in 24- or 26-point type instantly ceases as every head swivels towards the person who uttered the magic word. Mouths snap shut, eyes peer expectantly, and every mind thinks the same thought: “Someone’s figured out what to do next!”

“Let’s do one thing,” says Pankaj. “Let’s order both veg and non-veg.”

“Do one thing,” says Murali. “Set the headline in Times New Roman.”

“You have carpal tunnel? Do one thing,” says Shilpa. “Adjust your chair higher, put something underneath your feet, and put the keyboard on your lap.”

One thing can be ten things, but it’s still one thing: it’s clarity. It’s an answer. It’s a solution. It’s a way to move forward. “Do one thing” is so powerful because it implies an exit from this mess. “Do one thing” means that debate is over and it’s time for action. To argue with “do one thing” is to be against progress, against action. A “do one thing” solution is one that is presented not for consideration but for execution.

It works. It’s amazing. For twenty minutes you’ll be mourning the TV shows you’ll be missing and the dinner that will be getting cold because the meeting about the new tagline for the new server product will never end; and then suddenly someone utters the magic words, and you’re on your way home with simple clarity as to what has to happen next. “Do one thing” works even when “one thing” is as nonsensical as being tasked to “find a word for ‘IT’ that doesn’t invoke images of technology.” No one in the meeting realizes how impossible the task is because how hard could it be? All you have to do is do one thing.

customer service

We spent three days during our first two weeks in India searching market after market for a wireless router. Our landlord’s son picked up the phone and had one delivered in less than thirty minutes.

Whoa.

We come from a land of two-month waits for a dentist’s appointment (and cancellation charges if you don’t show up). Of surly cashiers who pretend not to notice you standing in front of them. Of supermarket checkout girls who will call their manager to complain about YOU. Of postal employees who separate themselves from the world by three-inch-thick bulletproof glass. Of emergency rooms empty of attendants, with nothing but a clipboard for you to put your name down. Of drugstore employees so notoriously bitter that our friend could dress up as one for the Halloween parade and yell at people and everyone who saw him — people of all races, from all neighborhoods, representing all income classes — immediately got the joke. (Here’s looking at you - Duane Reade)

But here…! When you need your teeth cleaned, you can make an appointment for that afternoon. If you need a new computer battery, they’ll deliver one to you. The video rental store will collect money from your house. The chemist will pull out every brand of toothpaste for you to examine. The beer store will arrange for a guy to carry your beer home. The bank representative promises to call you back with information on your account the next day – and actually does. Your accountant will come to your home. Checks clear in hours. You’re on a gurney and getting an IV ten minutes after you walk into the emergency room. And if you have a health question, SMS the doctor and he’ll call you back – he’ll even make house calls.

House calls, for Christ’s sake!

In the US, customer service is uniformly terrible because the employee has no stake in the outcome beyond their $4.25 an hour. The McDonalds guy will roll his eyes at your request for extra mustard because he knows his performance will have no impact on the billions of dollars the company will make, and because he knows the company sees him as a trained monkey pressing cash register buttons whose job is secure only until the company trains actual monkeys to do the same thing.

But here, there must be a clear connection between performance and outcome. From McDonalds to multinationals, people must have that personal stake in the outcome so sorely missing in the US. They must see every opportunity leading to more and better opportunities. Because why else would customer service be so good?

We come from a place where process is more important than result — and where, from McDonalds to multinationals, everyone strives to hide inside the process, to use it to protect them from extra work. It constantly amazes us to see people do their jobs well — and, even more shockingly, to do them fast.

Rags-to-Pads: your chance to help rural Indian women

In the time we’ve been here, Dave and I have grown close to an organization called the Pardada Pardadi School for girls. On their behalf, we’re launching a fundraiser called Rags-to-Pads.

Pardada Pardadi is located in an area of Uttar Pradesh so poor that many women can’t afford pads during their period. So they typically use rags torn off old saris to staunch their flow — a practice that risks terrible infection every period from puberty to menopause.

We are raising $5000 to help Pardada Pardadi buy a machine that makes sanitary pads and support two of the school’s graduates as they start a pad-making business. The goal is to create a self-sustaining business that sells pads at around 25 rupees for packs of ten — simultaneously bringing an affordable and sanitary option to women on their periods while creating economic opportunities for women in an area that has next to none.

If 125 people donate $40 each (about what an American woman will spend on pads every year), we can make this happen. Once we reach $5,000, we’ll stop collecting money — this isn’t a charity, this is a donation of seed capital.

Learn more and donate at RagsToPads.com. Please help us spread the word! You can also see pics from our trip to Pardada Pardadi on Flickr.

peons

“Gopal!” shouted my boss. “Water!”

Across the office – way across, for my boss has quite a set of lungs – Gopal looked up. My boss and I were far closer to the water cooler than he was, but he quickly walked back past us and into the kitchen. He emerged and came to my boss’s side, patiently holding the glass out as my boss ignored him for a moment, for two moments, for a third moment, and then took the glass of water.

Gopal is a peon. Before I came to India I could think of few more derogatory terms to describe a low man on the totem pole; but I once looked my company’s employee handbook, and that’s exactly the word in official use. Also known as “office boys”, you find them in every business doing every unskilled task: washing dishes, fetching tea, making copies, moving tables, emptying trash, cleaning desks, couriering documents, putting your food on a plate, handing out napkins for cake when an office birthday is celebrated, and going down the street to buy cigarettes whenever anyone runs out.

This is how an economy responds to a glut of unskilled labor: supply pushes wages down the point where it’s cheaper to hire someone to get water for employees than it is for employees to spend thirty seconds getting it themselves.

I resisted when I first got here. How could I ask another human being to do something so trivial? Something I was perfectly capable of doing myself? When I needed water, or a pen, or a photocopy of my passport, I would try to make a statement: to show them that I saw myself as their equal. That I didn’t think myself above a little manual labor.

But they didn’t like it. They eyeballed me as I waved them away and worked the copier by myself. I smiled broadly, hoping that my egalitarian intentions were clear.

But they clearly didn’t like it. And why should they? It was like I had flown in from America to take their jobs. If I made my own copies and got my own water, and everyone else did the same, what would be left for them to do? Why would the company need them at all?

“In America, wealth is measured by what you own,” an Indian friend told us. He’d lived in America for four decades before returning to Delhi. “In India, it’s different: wealth is measured by what you can get people to do for you.”

I better understand the role peons play—and the opportunity this role provides. Fetching staplers and picking wrappers off our desks is a hell of a lot better than guarding an ATM or carrying bricks on your head. I’m still uncomfortable shouting my demands across the room. But I no longer wash out my own coffee cup. And when I need a pen, I know whom to ask. The supply closet isn’t my domain, it’s theirs. And it’s not just their domain – it’s their livelihood.