Golden Songbirds & Kuremal Kulfi

I don’t smoke, it makes me cough. But not smoking has many harmful side-effects, the greatest being the lack of a legitimate excuse to step away from the shackles of the office every hour. The only alternative makes people wonder how small your bladder could possibly be. As such, I have resigned to the life of a pretend-smoker. I pretend to smoke, and together with my pretend-addict buddies I vanish, sometimes for many minutes at a time. People wonder, and offer us pretend-sympathy.

Now a question often turns up in these smoke breaks, an important question – what to do with the energies that lie in the future? What paths to take? The most pragmatic element of this eternal question for the people in my pretend smoking circle is the question of geography. Should they try to go abroad, or should they continue in Gurgaon di galiyan?

Often at this point a pig trots by on its way to lunch in the garbage bin behind our building.

But the more concerning point that is raised is of opportunity. Are there opportunities in India? It is often felt by the participants that there are not. There are so few investment banking jobs here. Half the corporates are lala companies where you have to carry your boss’ briefcase. No one listens to ideas from juniors. So forth.

These are true.

But then there is Kuremal Kulfiwala.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/iinindia/4950355347/

That is Kuremal Kulfiwala. That is the shop. As you might have noticed, the facade of the shop front happens to be thin air. There are some luxuriously appointed plastic chairs, which were absent the day I’d visited. There is a stair in the background, going to the loft.

The picture is from google images, perhaps the second or third row.  In fact Kuremal Kulfiwala is surprisingly easy to find on google. There is a simple reason for that – everybody knows that Kuremal Kulfiwala makes THE BEST KULFI IN THE WORLD.

Seriously, they do.

And everyone knows it. And by everyone we mean half of Delhi, spurred on by the love shown for their kulfi by the few million people who seem to be pressed together in the human sandwich of Delhi 6, who are perhaps the most demanding and discerning kulfi consumers in the country.

They are not the only kulfi consumers in the country though.

So the natural follow-up question is: Why don’t people in the rest of the country know about Kuremal? Why isn’t it a household name like Kwality ice-cream? Why does there only seem to be one thin person with an unenthusiastic mustache in the shop?

And finally, does this mean there’s no opportunity, or there’s lots of it?