Dabbawallahs

Every day, a large number of lunch deliverers (dabba wallahs) trudge through Bombay with one hundred kilogrammes of food on their heads. The working man is attached to his wife preparing the food, and not someone from a lower caste, Heaven forbid. Subsequently, the dabba wallah distributes this lunch through an ingenious network. The manager of the lunch dispatch company still paints letters and figures on the lunch boxes himself. In the course of time, illiterate employees have come to recognise the letters, he explains. Now and then, when business is low, he also sells a few chickens, because a growing number of men choose to ignore the tradition of the caste system and turn to the canteens. One of the workers’ wives has been preparing lunches for her husband for 22 years, mixing turmeric and cloves in them, ‘against coughs and colds’. By means of different portraits, the filmmakers depict a phenomenon that is slowly dying.