Tiffins and Sachin Tendulkar's Uncle

A few years ago when I worked for PeopleSoft, now Oracle, I met a man named Prakash Tendulkar. He is one of Sachin Tendulkar’s uncles. He was a crazy guy who had already retired once, but decided he liked working so much that he took a job working answering help desk calls at PeopleSoft.

I remember him walking down the hall one afternoon – heading out of the office waving his hand in the air with a blissful smile on his face – as his manager called after him to nail him down on a detail of some kind. This was Prakash and Prakash told me that if I ever make it to India – I needed to visit Goa.

So I'm on my way there from Delhi!

To give props to Truong Tran -- here is the triangle sandwich I had on the flight:

The box says "IndiGo Tiffin" on it -- and as with many things Indian -- everything has a story behind it.

The first time I saw the term tiffin, it was on drab storefront in Hyderabad. It was of little consequence to me at that moment -- other than it being an English term that I had never heard of before. But I saw this unfamiliar term over and over again and finally asked about it and got an incredible answer, which is summarized in this wiki article.

The key point of interest for me here is the delivery mechanism: "This system delivers thousands of meals a day and does not use any documents as many Dabbawallas are illiterate. It has been claimed that the tiffin delivery system of Mumbai is so efficient that there is only one mistake for every million deliveries."

The Colonel and Dr. R.K. Mittal, both of whom I asked about tiffins, both cited this incredible delivery system. Per Dr. Mittal, the meals are meant to be affordable by the working class in India and these systems are no longer just delivering meals prepared by wives, but have also expanded to cook and deliver the meals. And the meals are not just being delivered to workplaces, but to homes as well. He said that he had them a few times -- and they weren't very good. =)

I am curious about this documentless delivery system. Being the geek I am, the first thing I thought was -- how are these messages being delivered without documented IDs and sequences? Is there a methodology of brilliant simplicity at work here and what is it?

This other wiki post on Dabbawallas, the tiffin delivery people, tells a more complete story. There aren't written documents per se -- but there are IDs and sequencing systems at work. I wonder if their efficiency rating will go up or down now that they are starting to "embrace modern information technology?"