Pratik

Nerve Endings Firing Away

Jugaad-ing Discrimination

In India, we have a concept called jugaad. It’s basically MacGyvering, i.e., problem-solving using previously unthought-of hacks. It often works best when using limited resources and working within constraints. At least that was the original thought. But soon, it devolved into bending the rules, often blurring the ethical lines.

We have a local Indian restaurant that we love getting takeout from. They serve an acceptable quality of biryani that we like considering that different parts of India have their own style of biryani. We like the less-soggy version where you can see separate grains of rice and comes with bone-in meat cooked with the rice and not added later1. Recently, they changed ownership, and we noticed a decline in the biryani quality. A few weeks ago, their website shut down. We were sad that one of the few places we liked got shut down. Naturally, we blame the pandemic. But last week, I came across this story from December - Biryani-N-Grill restaurants ordered to pay back $170K after federal overtime investigation.

Ah-ha! So the owners thought they could cheat their employees with practices that often would be ignored in India. Although we will miss our biryani, I’m glad the feds cracked down on the owners.

But there’s still hope on the biryani front. One of our friends mentioned that a Pakistani company had bought it, and it will be reopened under the name Tandoori Lounge. Our favorite place for biryani in Texas is a small Houston restaurant run by a Pakistani. The ambiance is not great, but it was featured on Anthony Bourdain, so it’s pretty legit.


  1. Yes, people commit that blasphemy. ↩︎


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