What’s in your dabba?

unbearably bad.

Let us count the reasons. First: office canteens. Do you want an intuitive understanding of how subsidies,a single provider insulated from competition,and doubtful contracts can lead to terrible outcomes in big government schemes? Think for a moment about your cafeteria at work. However promising the caterer,the food’s descent into primordial sludge is inevitable. You wind up depressingly searching for the sole piece of gobhi in a dull steel pan filled with an anonymous brown mush,while traversing a table with several steel pans of minimally different degrees of dullness filled with sludges of infinitesimally different hues of brown.

The alternative,of course,is vouchers. (Really,the parallel to government schemes writes itself.) Unfortunately,the face value of vouchers never seems to quite follow the actual price and availability of food,something voucher fans have a hard time realising. So,if you’re fortunate enough to work for a company that hands out lunch vouchers,you can go to a Barista and have half a sandwich. If zoning even allows a Barista in your district.

Which is why,those who can abandon the paternalistic corporate food security system and examine their own resources. And those truly fortunate smile smugly at their fellows as they produce their packed lunch.

Presumably the idea of eating at work — rather than retiring in the afternoon for a well-earned dal-and-siesta — came in with the British and their depressingly Protestant work ethic,which is why we have no word for it but the Anglo-Indian “tiffin”. Packed lunches,could be studied by amateur sociologists or highly-paid consultants to multinationals for the oddly accurate insights they provide about the culture doing the packing.

In America,for example,you have brown-bag meetings,where you sit around and talk interminable shop while eating out of a nondescript brown bag. In the United Kingdom,a traditional “ploughman’s lunch” is bread,

butter,hard cheese,and a beer — which was,like most of that country’s hoary tradition,invented in the modern era. In Japan,where they never came across something they wouldn’t beautify and embellish,you have bento boxes,heartbreakingly elegant assortments of rice,fish,and veggies for one. And where else but in Mumbai could you imagine the entrepreneurship and the detailed,decentralised organisation that could set up a dabbawallah network that unerringly gets hot food from your house to your office half a megacity away? (OK,in Karachi,too.)

And once it reaches,the office divides into two sets of people: the have-tiffins and the have-nothings. The tiffinwallahs,with all the unthinking entitlement of those with a well-ordered household,will duly separate all their little metal boxes,while the rest of us grit our teeth and pretend to ignore the rice,the little bits of achaar individually wrapped,the two different veggies and the plastic container of dahi. Then comes the exchange: all the tiffinwallahs examine each others’ veggies,pronounce them excellent,and proceed to pool them together,while you morosely wonder how soon Domino’s will deliver.

There is an entire world of social pitfalls that being a tiffinwallah opens up for you. Are you,perhaps,bad with sharing? It will be easy,then,for you to skulk inside your cubicle,positioning yourself between your aloo-gobhi and the world,raising your head to snarl warningly at anyone who walks in. For the non-tiffinwallah,too,there are difficult decisions: how does one tell that nice old lady in the next aisle that her lunch always smells terrible,further reducing your already low afternoon productivity?

Above all,perhaps,the relationship between the tiffinwallah and the non-tiffinwallah is defined by envy. We all yearn for,perhaps,school — when a packed lunch was both a comforting reminder of home,and something to be scorned in favour of the unhealthily delicious puchkas available two-and-a-half metres outside the school gates. It is amusing,almost,how much thought people put into their kids’ tiffin even as they are completely lackadaisical about what they’ll eat themselves. But if we haven’t grown up all that much,learn from the kids we were,and let’s think of what packed lunches should actually be — using the rules that applied to the tiffin we wanted then. First,they should be good cold. Like cut carrots or parathas. Second,for peace in the office and ease of consumption,make your lunch snacky,not a full meal with all the fixings. And finally,share it around,people. Nobody likes the kid who eats alone.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com