All the food you can eat!

I continue to be amazed by this city. Today I was scarred for life by the fish market. Something in me got me to say "yes" to going with my parents. I don't regret it though - it was most interesting... and smelly, might I add. Besides dead fish and the people selling them, there are also ugly black crows and some other sort of white bird that looked a lot like a flamingo but much smaller and cats that are waiting around... to catch some fish, I guess. I tried to imagine what its like to sit there all day being one of the vendors and I can only salute them for doing it. I don't think I would last an hour. As much as I love fish, I could never be a fish vendor.
Anyway, a while ago on the Travel and Living channel I watched one of Anthony Bourdain's programs while he was travelling through Kolkata and Mumbai tasting different sort of foods and he mentioned a certain statistic about the "dabbawallas" in Mumbai that fascinated me... So I googled "dabbawallas" and thought i'd share some of it with you...
"Around five thousand dabbawallas, work every day through a system of multiple relay to deliver tiffin boxes in an exercise that begins at 9am and ends at 5pm."
These guys use cycles and the trains to deliver approximately two lakh dabbas of lunch prepared at home to officegoers and they have an amazing 99.999999 percent of correctness which means one error in sixmillion transactions!
And this is how it works...
*The first dabbawalla picks up the tiffin from home and takes it to the nearest railway station.
*The second dabbawalla sorts out the dabbas at the railway station according to destination and puts them in the luggage carriage.
*The third one travels with the dabbas to the railway stations nearest to the destinations.
*The fourth one picks up dabbas from the railway station and drops them off at the offices.
*The process is reversed in the evenings.
Isn't that amazing? What efficiency huh? I wonder why it doesn't work in all parts of India though... sigh.
You can read more at this link.
Better head home...
More later,