Grey Matter

India is a full of small time traders who are the retailers to major chunk of the population.

My family buys milk from a milk vendor,called palkaramma(meaning: milk trading woman in tamil)whose real name many even dont know,
Since to everyone she is known as and only as the palkaramma.
Palkaramma has some cows and buffallows with which she makes her living.
We get fresh cow milk everday delivered by the palkaramma’s son.Yesterday i attended her grand child’s birthday celebration.
It was a very grand celebration.

Annachi kadai is where we buy the groceries.Similar to palkaramma,
the owner of the shop is known to the world as ”Annachi”(meaning: elder brother).
The groceries are also door delivered by the small boy working under annachi to our home.Annachi recently came to my house to give sweets for
the birth of his son.

My family’s dealing with these traders date back to more than 2 decades.
Its amazing to see that any amount of advertising and other marketing
by packeted milk hasn’t spoiled this relationship.

This is what is the ”indianness” of retailing.Retailers in india are more than just
traders,they have an emotional connect and a lifelong relationship
with their customers.They are more like extended part of the family.

This is what Kishore Biyani portraits in his book”It happened in India”(BTW
you can read this book if you dont mind the excessive amount
of self publicity and extract relevent matter for you)

Now that my company is providing me with sodexho pass there was bit of
argument in the house about where to buy the groceries.While my mother
was in favour of buying groceries in some departmental store with those
passes my father was against it as he did not want to embarass Annachi.
I was in support of my father. Since if the sodexho was not spent in groceries
they will have to be spent in restaurants so that would mean more
eat-outs for me

But at the end we ended up trying the departmental store.While i was coming back from shopping Annachi was staring at me with shock.
I haven’t spoken to him yet after that. :(

“Do you actually believe chillies never existed in India before Portuguese brought it to India some 500 years back.What were we eating then if everything was brought from somewhere to india.Do you think the so called traditional andhra’s spicy culinary which involves a huge deal of chilli’s was this recent.Its a what the leftists wants us to believe.We were the uncultured nomads and the so called invasions that cultured us.The whole Aryan theory is to make us feel that our ancestors were nothing more than mating mammals.” proclaimed my rightist colleague.Its the question of origin that is always disputed.Like the origin of human beings.I personally don’t believe in the theory that God created one pair of man and woman and the rest of the human race are the children of them.What i believe is that the human beings should have sprung up all over the world in large quantities,just like the bacterias that form in a unused food item.They appear in numbers never one pair which yields to many.This is also the politically correct belief.No offense to any religion,but why didn’t the believers question “the first human beings reproduced some X number of children,what next, how did the next generation come.Did the children mate each other?”.Disgusting.Back to chilli business.I don’t know whether the Portuguese brought it to India or not.Since i don’t believe in history.History is written by the winning hands.Had Hitler won the World War the history would have been different at this time.But chillies are the back bone of some businesses.Both small and large.While the small time Andhra mess entrepreneurs are running their business based on their reputation of curry with a huge amount of chillies,there are middle men who buy chillies from Guntur and and resell them in neighboring markets such as Tamil Nadu.And there are huge exporters who export the chillies to other countries.I have read that Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh is the second largest exporter of chillies in the world next only to Mexico.What happens if there is huge rains in the Guntur region? The number of quality chillies gets reduced.So the demand increases for the chillis.The importer in the other country has got two options either pay higher or go get it from other countries if it is economically feasible.When the economics doesn’t suit to buy in other country they would pay higher for the chillies.So the chili prices would go higher.There could possibly be a uproar over the issue in the parliament and the activities of the parliament would be dismantled by the opposition then by the ruling party.The Govt would order a temporary ban on exporting chillis to other countries.Mean while the small time Andhra mess would have to either cost the customers more or replace chili with probably pepper in their kitchens.That would mean more business to the Pepper merchants in Kerala.Meanwhile the chili price in the Mexican market would go higher since there is more demand for Chillies.So the stocks of the companies that involved in chili business would go up.Well,well, this is chaos theory for you.There is a chain of reaction for a single action.Thats what the golbalization has brought us.A tightly inter weaved global economy where every country depends on what happens in the other countries. So much for the Chillies .

Final ‘fun’da:Why is something thats HOT is called a ‘CHILL’i.