Gourmet Foods in India

Indians in a few leading cities have started taking to western gourmet foods. The market really opened up four years back when import restrictions got relaxed. Today, cheese (Cheddar and Edam being particular favourites), wine (both new world and French), extra virgin olive oils are available in quite a few places. Availability, awareness and affluence will be the critical factors in driving the business in future. The advent of fine-dine restaurants, global travel and deep engagement of the elite with western countries have helped in the spread of the gourmet foods.

There was an international exhibition on food and wine in Delhi last week. There were more than one hundred and eighty exhibitors from twenty-four countries showcasing their finest wine and other products and I am sure they did very well. This is the right point to enter India. Moet and Chandon is reaping benefits of an early entry and good publicity during its earlier entry.

I made a presentation on the gourmet food retail scenario in India in the inaugural summit of the exhibition and the delegates found it very encouraging that this huge market is opening up to quintessentially European tastes.

Caviars, truffles and foie gras are to be still accepted by the Indian palate and they are a bit too heavy for the wallet. But wine, cheese, sauces, asparagus, premium coffees, specialty meats and expensive chocolates have found their next big market, for sure. India is no stranger to gourmet foods. The Mahrajahs and Nawabs had elevated food to a fine art and used the finest spices ,ingredients and techniques for their food. The Indian tradition of hospitality and lavish formal occasions are going to be other factors helping the growth of this market.

Blaming the Politicians

There is a lot of justifiable anger and frustration at the brazen attacks and the terrible loss of life in Mumbai. The Indian state is weak and ineffective and is not able to protect its citizens. The media and the public are pouring venom on the politicians of all hues. They are technically right because the ministers in the government are supposed to be the policy-makers and supposed to take the decisions. But they have failed to do so and on the face of it they are culpable.

But these politicians are elected by us and before we chose them we knew their capabilities and character and we chose them. They were neither expected to change overnight and nor did we think they would. So what is the point of spewing anger on them?

The politicians the society chooses are actually a reflection of the society itself. A semi-literate and caste and community ridden society will choose politicians which reflect its character and our politicians by and large are what we are .

Only a literate and economically prosperous society will tend to choose politicians that the media and the average middle-class urban Indian expects.Till we transform our society, we will live with our corrupt, venal and incompetent politicians.

This is easier said than done. Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati were arguably our brightest economists and thinkers in seventies and eighties. Amartya Sen always spoke about the importance of heath and education and Jagdish Bhagwati preached free trade. We did not listen to them. We kept following a social and economic policy framework which was based on poor thinking and vested interests.

The Indian society has to get out of its habit of taking the easy way out and feeling comfortable with mediocrity. A mix of focus on primary health services, education and free trade would have made India a different country, a better society now and given us a different kind of politician today.

This is just one example of how our inherent failings and weaknesses as a people and society are leading us to a life we do not want to accept. This is the time to reflect and change.

What ails Indian writing ?

The Man Booker award to Adiga is a fine statement of affirmation of Indian writing. There have been previous winners too from India. But the Indian writers who have spent bulk of their lives in India still fail to fire the imagination of readers in the world.

Their stories are engagingly told and capture a time and place perfectly well. But the themes are not universal enough to connect to everybody. The writers lack the penetrating insight of a Naipaul, who harshly throws a searchlight into our souls. They do not have the suave urbanity and haunting themes of emotional loss of a Kundera. They do not provide the searing intensity of a Coetzee or the subtle romanticizing of a Mahfouz.

I think this happens because Indians grow up in protected environments. They live within defined boundaries and fail to explore the limits of their lives in relationships and in their own internal journeys. The society also tries its best to see that any behaviour or attitude beyond its five thousand years of past is smacked hard. So when an Indian writes and tries to plumb his depths of experience , he falls short of capturing deep, eternal truths and the unvarnished realities. There are a few notable exceptions in Indian languages however.

It does not help that the country lacks a culture of reading except in a few places.

There is a long way to go for Indian writing to flourish internationally.

All That Additional Space !

A recent report in a financial daily says that the additional mall space in India is going to double in 2010 from the current levels. The additional availability in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, NCR, Mumbai, Calcutta and Chennai is 16.2 mn sq feet in 2008. This is going to become 19.1 mn sq feet in 2009 and 32.4 mn sq feet in 2010. Does demand exist for all this space?

In the US, the first mall in the world came up in Minnesota (Southdale Shopping Centre) in 1956.Victor Gruen, a refugee from Austria, conceptualized this to provide the experience of a European city centre. He made the structure covered and air-conditioned to enable people to visit it round the year. This also helped the whites perfectly well to have a cloistered environment in the suburbs. Today, the rich whites are going back to city centres and the suburbs are getting more mixed. This is taking away the principal customer segment for the malls - the affluent, white women. The conventional mall is also facing troubled times. The US has about eleven hundred malls today and no new mall is coming up.

Contrast this with the supply situation in India- NCR alone has close to seventy malls (albeit smaller ones). A back of the envelope calculation will show that the incomes, demand and availability of space are not even remotely matched. The cities are also full of vibrant open markets and shopping complexes. No wonder, the malls are faring badly and some charge exorbitant rates to break even. But that is a suicidal game because the tenants suffer and eventually leave.

The industry now needs to have a deeper understanding of demand and supply. The viable demand is much lesser than availability and the supply of space needs to go up far more slowly.