Something has died in Mumbai. Not a person, but a system. A hundred year old wonder of low tech logistics.
The dabbawalas. British logistics experts are now studying their collapse. They should.
For this is not just a failure of delivery. It is a failure of infrastructure, of planning, of the very idea that a city can sustain organic genius. The dabbawalas, those colour coded lunch carriers, were a living relic of a more ordered India.
A India of bicycles, of trust, of a million perfect errors that never happened. They sorted 200,000 lunch boxes daily. No computers.
No apps. Just six sigma perfection in the streets of a chaotic metropolis. But chaos won.
The chaos of a city that forgot how to let them breathe. Cars. Traffic.
Apathy. The very success of Mumbai’s growth choked its most elegant tradition. The British experts will write reports.
They will praise the system. They will mourn its loss. And then they will return to London and marvel at their own efficiency.
But they will miss the point. The dabbawalas were not a business. They were a civilisation.
A civilisation that India let die. One honk at a time.
