Office Politics/Gastro Politics

One night, my boss in India asked me to stay the night at the office so she and I could work late on a big grant application and not have to worry about getting home late. We did end up getting some work done, but there was also a wedding across the street, so our work ended at a certain point.

We spent the rest of the evening talking about our friends and families and eating Indian ramen (Maggi Noodles). We slept in the front room of the office (actually the top flat of an apartment building) on the two mattresses we normally sat on during the workday.

Because we had slept at the office, we wouldn’t be able to bring food for lunch like usual. There wasn’t much by way of quality eating in the neighborhood and my boss Dipti asked our office assistant Sunil to bring food for all 3 of us from home the next day, so we could still have a home-cooked meal. When lunch time came though, it turns out he only brought enough for two. When she asked him why, Sunil replied that he didn’t think that I, a foreigner, would eat food prepared by a lower caste family.

The anthropological sirens in my head started blaring: Appadurai is still relevant! I am living my own version of Gastro Politics in Hindu South Asia! The caste system still largely impacts how people interact with one another! This is so problematic yet fascinating!

When the sirens died down and we had all eaten lunch (two years later, I have no recollection of what the solution was. My guess is Maggi noodles.) I started to think more critically about what had just happened. Until that point, I had always insisted on doing things for myself that he had offered to do for me, like refilling my water bottle or plugging my computer charger in to the wall socket. We had completely different expectations of how an office should function in the most basic ways, and it was something so essential as eating lunch that had the biggest impact.