Reminiscences from a Bangalore long forgotten - Ration Shop

Most of earlier posts were longish posts with each focusing on a relatively recent or should I say current topic. So I thought I would go back in time and try and describe what it meant to be a child growing in India in the late seventies and early eighties. I often refer to my generation (which is inching towards the mid-thirties) as "probably the last generation to have seen an India of shortages progressing to the new India of reasonable plenty which we see today" but what do I mean when I say this?

Just this last Sunday I was sitting having an interesting conversation with dear friends (lets call them S&J) and the topic strangely veered towards this topic of how much change my generation has seen. Although the difference in age between my S and myself on one side and J on the other would be no more than 7 years the difference in perception was stark. S and I started talking about how life was and as is my wont I brought up a few of my pet examples. All these examples I am sure will be familiar in some form or other to people from my generation but were totally alien to J and her generation. To me it just showed how quickly life had changed to the extent that people just a few years younger cannot even imagine what was to me a reality at that time.

In this post, I want to highlight one such example illustrating how on such dramatic change and how much of that change I have been a witness to. The example I am going to give was a central theme in most urban / rural middle class homes and even I would say upper middle class homes and it is called a "Ration shop". I remember growing up in Bangalore - a relatively small (at that time) yet fairly cosmopolitan city and distinctly remember the role played by this concept called the ration shop. For those who have not seen one before, let me describe a typical ration shop. A ration shop is usually best identified by the nondescript nature of the store. The only distinguishing mark would be a tin board hanging or placed outside the store with the "latest" administered price of all items sold in the store written with a wet chalk to ensure durability of the writing. Ration stores were distributed all over the city and the smallest suburbs usually had their own ration stores. In Bangalore, this yellow and black board with white lettering was for a very long time a fairly identifiable landmark. In fact, people would indicate driving directions with the ration shop as a landmark. That should indicate to you the importance of the ration store, never mind that the ration store had a mind of its own when it came to shop timings, stock keeping, and so on.

Now to the best of my knowledge the ration shop is probably the only place almost ALL families would go to buy .... wait.... hang on to your seat - OIL and SUGAR in addition to essential food grains/cereals like rice / wheat. If I recall correctly, in the late eighties a family of four was entitled to a total of 20 kg of rice per month @ 5 kg per head or some equivalent quantity of wheat and 2 kg of sugar a month at 1/2 a kg per head and this purchase would be entered into something called a "ration card". The "ration card" for those who continue to wonder is a small palm sized book (this is in the state of Karnataka) with information on the holder of the "ration card" including the members in the household and a picture of the head of the household. The ration shop itself was run on some form of fixed time contract. The person owning this contract therefore was invariably out to fatten his purse in the quickest possible time and to this end, he resorted to tacts such as creating artificial demand for essentials, or diverting rations from one eligible ration card holder to another in exchange for a little extra and such like cheap tricks. I remember witnessing some ration shop managers exhibiting an almost a demi-god like demeanor when it came to rendering service. Most middle class people in the cities patronized the ration shop only to purchase sugar and oil since these essentials were either unavailable or very expensive out in the free market. Of course, it was not uncommon to see people purchasing kerosene / rice / wheat too from the ration shops but these mostly purchased for the explicit purpose of handing them over to domestic staff who invariable had no ration card.

Now why am I inflicting this torture on you with descriptions of this antiquated concept? Well, its because like I said at the start, that I would like to go back in time a little, so this is a snapshot of LIFE in the seventies and even up until the late eighties. If you spare a thought to people who started their life in that age and time, you will probably realize that many of them (parents of my generation most certainly) had a wee bit more to contend with than having to fret over the color of the next family car.

If I find pictures of a ration shop I will definitely put them up here, but for now, with these memories I leave you and I will return with another memory from the past in the coming days.