HOW I QUIT GOOGLE TO SELL SAMOSAS
Munaf Kapadia with Zahabia Rajkotwala
HarperCollins India, Rs 399
How I Quit Google to Sell Samosas is the story of how an adventurous entrepreneur grew a weekend Bohri food pop-up from his home into an F&B start-up with a Rs 4 cr turnover. An edited excerpt:
When I eventually quit Google to sell samosas, I set timelines for myself, an exit strategy of sorts, that allowed me to pivot back to the employee life if I didn’t achieve certain objectives within a one-year time frame. I also started working on a plan on how to take TBK to the next level.
My part-time foray into the home dining experience had been a rousing success and even Dad, who thought it unthinkable that we would charge people to eat food under our roof, started coming around.
He had laid down multiple conditions before allowing us to make the TBK Home Dining Experience official. One of them entailed memorizing fifty pages of text — basically anything and everything that he had found about the Dawoodi Bohra community — online. He made me promise that I would represent the community properly and answer questions accurately. Telling guests that the Bohra thaal was three feet in diameter because Bohras were at one point in time giants was unacceptable!
Though, if I’d been asked this question pre-TBK, that may have been my answer.
Here’s a glimpse of a little that I learnt.
Dawoodi Bohras are a subsect of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam. That sounds like a mouthful, and I could delve into the finer points of the origins and religious evolution of the Bohra community, but for the time being I’ll spare us all the history lesson and distil the story of our multilayered heritage to a few fun facts.
The Bohra community was formed by splitting several times over from its Ismaili branch due to succession wars. Our religious leadership (Dai al-Mutlaq), that had built its power centre in Yemen since 1151, transferred the seat of administration of the dawat or religious mission to Sidhpur in Gujarat in 1567.
There had been a wholesome and peaceful acceptance of our unique practice of the Islamic faith across the western coast of India. Today, members of our small community are settled in large numbers across many Indian cities: Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
A consequence of migration, certain social, cultural, linguistic and economic values of the Bohra community were permanently enriched by the Gujarati communities that we came to coexist with. Bohras adopted a dialect of Gujarati as their mother tongue (what we now call ‘dawat ni zubaan’); to this day, we are often mistaken for Parsis or even Gujaratis when we speak. This confusion can also be attributed to our last names. Take my own, for example — Kapadia. You’ll find Gujaratis, Parsis and Bohras with the same last name because, like the practice was at the time, we derived our last names from what we did professionally (Lokhandwala, Chitalwala, Baldiwala, Kapadia, Merchant, etc.) or where the family resided or used to reside (Pardiwala, Udaipurwala, Rajkotwala , etc.).
Our food was fantastically improved. From the meat-heavy diet that the dry landscape of the Middle East afforded us, we now had access to abundant green vegetables, grain, fresh fruit, dairy and whole spices that form such an important part of Indian cooking.
When I was growing up, if anyone asked me, ‘Munaf, what religion do you belong to?’ I would have said gaming is my religion. But otherwise, any real awareness of religious identity came from Mom’s food and memories of eating around a Bohra thaal — either at home on Eid, at Bohra weddings, or at the occasional religious gathering that we attended.
I do believe food gives you the easiest access into the culture of a community or family. When I first came up with the idea of calling people over and have them eat Mom’s food in an attempt to keep her occupied, I was also simultaneously thinking how exciting would it be for a non Bohra to eat around a thaal?
For those of you who have never had the chance to eat from a thaal, let me paint a picture of what a typical meal around a thaal looks like.
According to tradition, us Bohras sit on the floor on a square cloth mat called a safra and eat from a thaal, which is a large steel platter. The average thaal is three feet in diameter and placed on top of a kundli (anything that gives the thaal a slight elevation). Seven or eight hungry guests can be seated around it, cross-legged (or somewhere between cross-legged and a padmasana) so that everyone can reach the centre of the thaal. At any Bohra function, you are likely to find yourself randomly sitting around a thaal, shoulder-to-shoulder with complete strangers.
At the end of the meal, you will either hate your fellow diners because somebody grabbed your samosa before you could get to it. Or, in all likelihood, you will make friends, get the latest on the chawl gossip and maybe even crack a potential business partnership!
Excerpted with permission from How I Quit Google to Sell Samosas by Munaf Kapadia with Zahabia Rajkotwala, published by HarperCollins India
