Sangamam ‘94

Circa 1989, the month of December… Virat Kohli was in his diapers and Mark Zuckerberg was 5 Years old, an entire bunch of teenagers in the city of Madras were honing up their skills in Calculus, Organic Chemistry, Optics etc. The only street corner discussions were…Machan DOTE 1 or DOTE 2?

For the uninitiated DOTE stands for Directorate of Technical Education, 1 falls into the tier of the erstwhile Government Engineering Colleges while DOTE 2 comprised of a bunch of Private Colleges at its infancy in Madras.

The objective was getting into one of them. The buzz words that did the rounds were cutoffs, management quote, DOTE 1, DOTE 2, Mechanical, Civil or Electronics Engineering. The options were few then.

Finally come August 1990, destiny brought a bunch of guys and girls from very diverse backgrounds,  some first time literates from their respective families, some first time graduates, some first time Engineering aspirants  and finally some children of Professors of Engineering in the erstwhile Institute of Technology in Madras. That was how diverse we were. Yet on day one, the fateful day, we made our journey down the muddy two lane highway called the Old Mahabalipuram Road to our destination for the next 4 years, Hindustan College of Engineering, as one bunch of naïve unsure teenagers dressed like POW’s with shirts out, bathroom slippers and all, fearing the wrath of the ‘Seniors’ and their unwelcome initiation ceremonies. After spending the first year mostly in fear and anxiety with a close knit bunch, we went our ways in the sophomore year to pursue careers in Mechanical, Civil or Electronics and Communication.

The drafter was the aspiring Engineers Stethoscope; we took great pride in flaunting it just to keep our neighborhood aware that we are pursuing what every Indian parent dreamt of. A Degree in Engineering.

In Mechanical from where yours truly is from we encountered, TOM, SOM and DOM. It translates to Theory of Machines, Strength of Materials and Design of Machines and all these books were written by one Khurmi who ended up giving us nightmares for the next couple of years. My favorite though was a book on Thermal Engineering by one P. L Ballaney. It was hard bound book and had just the right number of pages when wrapped with a towel would support your cranium well and thereby transferring the contents directly to your brain, or so we believed.

We were a special bunch of kids is what I always felt. We entered the last decade of a millennium looking forward to a new one with aspirations and ambitions. While the Berlin wall was torn down and Nelson Mandela walked free the first disruptions in technology were also happening.  The internet was at its infancy, Email was just taking shape, transition from rotary dial to digital keypad phones were making its appearance, and by the time we reached our final year mobile phones were making its way  in developed countries but was yet to reach the shores of India. The seeds of disruptive technologies that we see today were sown during the period we spent in college.

25 years on, here we are with distorted waistlines and receding hairlines, but armed with titles & designations  prefixing and suffixing our names that mean nothing when we are with our bunch of  old friends to celebrate the emotions we went through on day one and the subsequent years we spent at HCE in the then sleepy hamlet of Padur.

Back to the city and the campus filled with emotions and rightly so.  They say Madras is an emotion and Chennai is a city. We have returned to the city 25 years on to celebrate and relive the emotions we left behind.

The Fourteen Idli Annachi is no more!

Given his misgivings people might raise eyebrows on a tribute to a man convicted for life imprisonment for murder and died a few days into his sentence.

For me he is a man who revolutionized vegetarian food in Madras. A kind of disruptor in his business almost 3 decades back.

Madras was famous for its Dosas, Idlis and other delicacies primarily dished out by all the ‘Vilases’ and dominated by the Udipi restaurants serving filter kaapis. The sad point was the kaapis were served with a couple of fingers of the waiter dipped in it and the idlis were served by the same hands. The cutlery was predominantly made up of highly dented and beaten up sheen less stainless steel plates and serving dishes.

Then Annachi happened… and he focused on the most important ingredient in any restaurants recipe for success and that was cleanliness which was missing all along in the industry. Cleanliness was confined to the Five Star rated restaurants or the second tier restaurants, frequented by the celebrities.

He employed revolutionary management techniques that were well ahead of its times.  A very distinct one comes to memory. You sit peacefully having a meal in one of their outlets and suddenly have burly bouncer looking men dressed in Full Black or in White shirt and khaki pants alighting from a Maruti Omni and rushing in and landing on your table and pick up, what was in your opinion a spotlessly clean glass and shouting aloud why the Glass wasn’t properly washed. You can call it a gimmick but I call it a very successful Management Technique since if I can recall that incident almost 3 decades later, that definitely left an impression in every other customer present there including me and prompting us to revisit Saravana Bhavan for its focus on cleanliness.

As a friend correctly mentioned, he kind of McDonaldised Vegetarian food in Madras. He came up with innovative dishes, predominant among them were the Fourteen Idlis.  He did this when the whole world knew of idlis that were made of a particular diameter, he reduced its diameter and called it mini idlis and made 14 of it and made them float in sambar.  Though down the line as inflation caught up and many competitors came up with versions called Floating Idli in which the numbers of idlis were less than fourteen. This in turn made the makers of the Stainless steel Idli moulds to reduce their diameters too and cater to an entirely new market for mini idlis.

If this was not disruptive what else is?

RIP Annachi and thank you for entertaining our taste buds all these years.