If you, like I, have never actually lived in Bombay, here’s a great primer on why office workers use the O.G. FedEx (via Kunjan):

A restaurant meal costs five to fifteen times more than home-food. To them, the dabbawalla brings the security of a cheap, clean, tasty and often still-warm, home-cooked meal… Bombay alone can sustain a dabbawalla network of this size and complexity because it alone, among Indian cities, has a quick, efficient and far-flung suburban railway service.

Not to mention that many have religion-based dietary restrictions. Density and train availability is also why some businesses only work in Manhattan and like cities; Bombay’s north-south orientation is strikingly familiar. Here’s how the routing system works — each packet is marked with hops, destination and recipient name, and handoffs are made at railway stations:

The outer case of Mohile’s dabba is marked with a black swastika, a red dot, a yellow stroke… Different marks on other dabbas tell the career at which stations en route he must pass them on to other waiting links in the crosscross network. At Victoria Terminus, the hub of commercial Bombay, Mohile’s dabba enters the last phase of its journey. Dabbawalla No. 4 waiting on the platform, picks it out together with other boxes marked with his symbol, the white cross. The black circle on Mohile’s case indicates its exact destination: the BMC Building. By 12.30 he has carried his crate up four flights of stairs and left Mohile’s lunch-box along with some 20 others in a corner of the canteen. Mohile, coming in at 1 p.m. will recognise his dabba from his name on an attached tag.

The dabbawallas’ perseverence puts the U.S. Postal Service to shame, and they charge only 35 rupees a month:

Some months ago, a dabbawalla waiting on his bicycle at a traffic light was hurled off the road by a lorry gone berserk and was smashed to death… The mukadam [dabba boss] got to hear of the accident within minutes and contracted the secretary of the Association… asked him to look after the police formalities, collected the dead man’s dabbas, and being familiar with the symbols, got them to their destination — just 30 minutes late…

It’s both remarkable and disturbing that life goes on for the price of a warm lunch. And there are apparently rampaging bands of hot lunch thieves, which makes crime in Bombay sound like an episode of the Care Bears. The monsoon season is worse:

… during the city’s notorious monsoon when rains lash the metropolis for days without let-up… [a] contractor proudly tells of how his “boys” think nothing of getting down on the flooded tracks and walking a few extra kilometres in the lashing rain with their [100 lb] head loads…

Mere coolies? Hell, maybe we should put them in charge of running the country:

“I have slogged like a donkey all my life, but I have given my son an education. I wanted him to be able to wear a clean shirt every day and sit in a nice air-conditioned office. He learned shorthand-typing and an officer, whose dabba I have been carrying, gave him a job.”

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