masala dosa to die for - nytimes
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MAGAZINE | NYT NOW
Masala Dosa to Die For
By ROLLO ROMIG MAY 7, 2014
Saravana Bhavan doesnt look like a house of secrets. Its dining room at
the corner of Lexington Avenue and 26th Street is clean and bright and
often attracts a line out front. It doesnt advertise because it doesnt
need to the fact that its one of the worlds largest chains of vegetarianrestaurants 33 in India, another 47 in a dozen other countries is
considered too obvious to its core clientele of Indian expatriates and
tourists to be worth trumpeting. In a city overwhelmed with
underwhelming north Indian food, Saravana Bhavan is the standard-
bearer of the delicacies of the south, but it makes no effort to educate
the uninitiated. If you dont know what a dosa is or how to eat it, youre
on your own.The man behind the chain is an elusive 66-year-old named P.
Rajagopal. Among his peers in the restaurant business in Chennai, the
south Indian city where Saravana Bhavan is headquartered, Rajagopal
is a legend. He brought prestige to the vegetarian business, said a
restaurateur named Manoharan, who runs a competing chain called
Murugan Idli. He made a revolution.
Born into a low caste in a remote province, he came to rule a field
that was once the sole domain of Brahmins, cleverly updating their
traditional fare in a setting that was both respectable and
unpretentious, thereby catering to Indias middle class at just the
moment it emerged. Today he employs morethan 8,000people in
Chennai alone. His workers enjoy benefits fantastic enough for Silicon
Valley (pensions, TVs, education), inspiring among them fierce loyalty
to Rajagopal. Every day thousands of pilgrims come to pray at the
temples he built in the village of his birth, and a hundred thousand
come to eat in his restaurants.
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His business model is so seemingly foolproof that the company has
acquired an air of invincibility, even as its founder became sullied with
scandal. As Saravana Bhavan went global, Rajagopal was charged with
murder, found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Yet he served a
total of only 11 months, and today hes free to continue his expansion
next stop Hong Kong, followed by Sydney, Australia. And then, if his
health holds out, building his first luxury hotel.
Saravana Bhavanspecializes in the holy trinity of south Indian
snacks known as tiffin: dosa, idli and vada. All are made from ground
rice and lentils, with remarkably different results. Dosas are crispy
golden crepes that are most deliciously served with a masala of potato
and onion vadas are deep-fried savory doughnuts and idlis, the souths
staple food, are pure-white saucer-shaped steamed cakes. At most
branches of Saravana Bhavan in Chennai, you can also find for sale a
little book titled, I Set My Heart on Victory. First published in 1997,
the book is Rajagopals memoir and manifesto, a curious blend of
mythmaking and self-effacement.
His story begins in 1947, 10 days before Indias independence from
the British, when he was born in the vast brushland in the southernstate Tamil Nadu. His village, Punnaiadi, was so inconsequential that it
didnt merit a bus stop his home was a shack with mud-and-cow-dung
floors. Rajagopal writes that he quit school after seventh grade, left
home alone and took a job wiping tables at a cheap restaurant in a
distant resort town, where he showered in a waterfall and slept on the
kitchen floor. But he was proud of his work, especially after the
restaurants tea master inducted him into the mysteries of making aperfect chai.
When he was a teenager, he moved to Chennai, then known as
Madras, and in 1968 opened the first in a series of tiny groceries on the
outskirts of the city. One day in 1979, at his grocery in a neighborhood
called KK Nagar, a salesman made a casual remark: Hed have to go all
the way to T Nagar for lunch because KK Nagar didnt have any
restaurants.A century ago, there were virtually no restaurants in all of Chennai.
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Its a country that was very conservative about eating out, said
Krishnendu Ray, a food-studies professor at N.Y.U. When Rajagopal
was born, the restaurant scene consisted of little more than Brahmin
hotels: modest affairs catering to the traveling upper caste, whose
dietary rules dictated that they couldnt eat food cooked by any caste
but their own. As a member of the Nadar caste, Rajagopal wouldnt
have been allowed to eat in most Brahmin hotels, let alone run one. But
by the time he came of age, entrepreneurs from other castes had begun
to meet Chennais increasing appetite for dining out.
There was little to suggest that Rajagopal was ready to join them.
When he opened his debut restaurant in KK Nagar in 1981, his
struggling shops had left him deep in debt, and he knew little about
food service beyond selling groceries. He made the leap, he told me,
only after an astrologer recommended that he try a line of work that
involved fire. A business adviser insisted that he should use cheap
ingredients and pay his staff as little as possible food workers are
vagabonds, he said, and theyll take what they can get. I did not like his
argument at all, Rajagopal writes in his memoir. He fired the adviser,
started using coconut oil and top-quality vegetables and gave hisworkers surprisingly high wages. The business lost 10,000 rupees a
month a big deficit for a restaurant where most items on the menu
sold for a rupee apiece.
But word spread that his food was tasty and cheap, and soon
Rajagopal was turning a profit and opening new branches. He
expanded his workers benefits, all of them unprecedented in Indian
restaurants: free health care, housing stipends, a marriage fund fortheir daughters. Saravana Bhavan workers started calling him Annachi,
a Tamil term of respect that means elder brother.
By the 90s, a Saravana Bhavan could be found in neighborhoods
throughout Chennai. Locals sometimes refer to the brand as their
version of McDonalds: well lit, ubiquitous and uncannily consistent.
Unlike McDonalds, the restaurants make everything from scratch. One
afternoon, a trio of bright-eyed assistants from the companys R & Ddepartment gave me a tour of the branch in Mylapore, a Chennai
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neighborhood. I was surprised to find that there were no freezers, just a
single walk-in cooler for vegetables that had been bought at market the
day before. Even the rice flour for the dosas was ground on the
premises.
When the tour was over, the assistants talked to me about
Rajagopal. He is the same as the father of a family, one said. Any
problem I have, he addresses it. The company pays for employees to
visit Rajagopals home village for a few days each year, he told me,
driving them down in a company bus. When I go there, I can witness
all the love and affection the village people have for Annachi.
I asked if the company had cut back on its package of benefits as it
has grown. Theyve only been increasing, a second assistant said. The
company provides them with magazine subscriptions, a cellphone and a
motorbike, he said, and covers the cost of fuel. (The only benefit it
discontinued was a haircut allowance.)
And we have mechanics so that we dont have to go outside to fix
our vehicles, the third told me.
My friend used to joke with me, The only thing you can do with
your salary is put it in the bank and save it, the second assistant said.They take care of everything.
In 2000, Saravana Bhavan branched out for the first time beyond
India, opening a franchise in Dubai, where Indian expats vastly
outnumber native-born Emiratis. According to Rajagopals elder son,
Shiva Kumaar, the opening-day crowd was like for a newly released
movie. Theyd eventually expand to Paris, Frankfurt, London, Dallas
and Doha, Qatar. The strategy is simple: open one restaurant in everycity with a large expat Indian population. (One exception is Manhattan,
which has two.) Prey on homesickness by importing skilled chefs to
ensure that the food tastes just the way it does in Chennai. Dont bother
trying to pursue non-Indian customers.
In 2002, the year that he opened franchises in Singapore and
Sunnyvale, Calif., Rajagopal was charged with murdering the husband
of a woman he wanted to marry. In 2003, his restaurant expanded toCanada, Oman and Malaysia, and he went to jail for the first time. In
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2004, a local Chennai court sentenced him to 10 years in prison. By the
end of that year, the empire had opened 29 branches worldwide.
Eight months into his prison term, the Supreme Court suspended
Rajagopals sentence on medical grounds while awaiting appeal, citing
his diabetes. In 2009, the Madras High Court not only upheld the
verdict but also upgraded the conviction from culpable homicide to
murder and enhanced his sentence to life in prison. After another three-
month stint, he was out on bail pending a Supreme Court hearing,
which no one expects to happen anytime soon. The courts wont give
him back his passport, but otherwise hes free to go about his life. All
but one of Saravana Bhavans 47 foreign franchises have opened in the
12 years since the murder.
Its amazing how he managed it, said Sriram V., a local historian.
I mean, our legal system is not thatbad.
Chennais tabloids published every lurid detail of the murder
allegations, but the restaurant just kept growing. Others in that
position would have totally collapsed, said Manoharan, of the
competing chain Murugan Idli. People thought he was finished. But
there was no impact.It helped that Rajagopal has little interest in personal fame he
promotes the restaurants brand, not his own, which makes it easier for
customers to compartmentalize. As one Saravana Bhavan loyalist told
me: Some of my friends used to say, How can you go and eat in his
restaurant? Youre actually fattening the wallet of a murderer. And I
used to tell them, Look, I dont know with whom I do business in my
day-to-day activity, whether hes a drunk or beats his wife. I have noidea, but I do business. So as long as hes giving me good-quality food, I
go there.
Saravana Bhavan employees have been especially faithful. M.
Mahadevan, a consultant who has helped with the chains international
expansion, told me a story to illustrate their devotion. I was at the
Saravana Bhavan down the road, drinking coffee with some friends,
Mahadevan said. The old man thats what Mahadevan callsRajagopal was in prison at that time. These big hulky guys came in,
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eight of them they were local rowdies. They wanted to eat without
paying. One of them was bullying the waiter, saying: Hey, mister, hows
your boss? Dont act funny, I know hes inside. There was a boy pouring
water, and he told them: Youre talking about my boss. You say
anything against him, and Ill put this jug of water into your mouth.
Not on you into your mouth. I was astonished. The boy was three-
foot-nothing. And immediately all the waiters came and stood next to
him.
For him, the old man was a god. Period. Hes got that kind of
loyalty. He takes boys from the street, from the villages, and he teaches
them. He picks them up and molds them.
One gloomy Wednesdayevening in August, I went to meet
Rajagopal at Saravana Bhavans headquarters, passing several of his
restaurants as I inched my way through the citys eternal gridlock.
Mahadevan met me in the dining room and escorted me to the bosss
office, introducing me on the way to Rajagopals 39-year-old son,
Saravanan, who is gradually taking over the companys domestic
operations. (His elder brother, Shiva Kumaar, runs the international
business.) For a while the three of us sat and stared at the walls: Everysurface was covered with blown-up images of Rajagopals family and
favorite Hindu deities. Then suddenly Mahadevan and Saravanan rose.
The office door swung open, and Rajagopal entered.
He was grayer and jowlier than he was in the photographs Id seen.
He regarded the room with mild amusement, bowed politely and
walked behind his desk, where he faced a portrait of a popular guru
and folded his hands for a moment of prayer. With him was GanapathiIyer, his oldest friend, and a personal assistant and a valet. We all sat
but the valet, who stood ready with a glass of water the instant his boss
coughed. Nobody relaxed.
I asked Rajagopal about his origins and business philosophy. Each
question was answered with a cascade of replies: Rajagopal would
answer in Tamil, then Saravanan or Mahadevan or Iyer or all three
would jump in to elaborate or clarify in English, a language Rajagopaldoesnt understand. It was a dynamic that sometimes clearly frustrated
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the boss.
When I asked about the murder, everyone started talking at once,
until Rajagopal cut impatiently through the chatter. Im not
responsible for anyones death, he said. I used to pray to my god, why
was I punished for someone elses mistake? There was a reason, he
decided: God wanted to give an opportunity for my son Saravanan to
learn business. Saravanan smiled faintly.
By the time we finished talking, it was nearly 11, and Rajagopals
workday still wasnt over. In the foyer outside his office, eight
employees were standing in line waiting to speak with him. An older
man with a handlebar mustache and a proud bearing told me that he
was a night watchman and was there to ask Rajagopal for a promotion.
Another said he hoped to be transferred to a different branch. A third
said he wanted to inform Rajagopal of his coming wedding.
I went back into Rajagopals office. He sat at his desk, studying a
spreadsheet with the aid of a magnifying glass. He consulted his
assistant and then called in the first man. Rajagopal ignored him and
barked into a walkie-talkie, asking the voice on the other end what had
brought in this man who stood before him.From the walkie-talkie came a surprising answer: They keep
fighting the whole night. That was not what he told me outside. The
man hung his head. Rajagopal fired him on the spot.
The next man came in, and another voice on the walkie-talkie told
Rajagopal that hed been fiddling with his cellphone in the dining
room. It turned out that nearly all the employees in line had lied to me
they were there to be disciplined.Youve been with us for two and a half years dont you know
that youre not supposed to use your phone during work hours?
Rajagopal said.
I did it by mistake, the man mumbled.
Answer my question! Rajagopal snapped.
I forgot, the man said.
How can you forget? When youre in service, you should serve.He decided to give the man another chance. Next up was the
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watchman.
I heard you got drunk and abused everyone and used foul words,
Rajagopal said. And you should shave off your mustache. These are not
good habits.
Im sorry, Annachi, he said. Forgive me.
How can I? Rajagopal asked. Theres an age to forgive. At your
age, it doesnt make sense. The watchman stared at the floor. Are you
listening? Rajagopal asked.
Again he decided to have mercy the man would keep his job as
long as he laid off the booze. He whispered his thanks and left without
ever looking up.
The nights work was over Rajagopal sat back in his chair. What
to do? he said. Everyone makes mistakes.
At the conclusionof Rajagopals appeal trial in 2009, the
Madras High Court issued a 30,000-word document that served as its
definitive statement on the case. By and large, a witness cannot be
expected to possess a photographic memory to recall the details of the
incident and the actual words uttered, the court warns. It is not as if a
videotape is replayed on the mental screen. But this is the version ofevents that the court found most credible.
According to the document, Rajagopal possibly on the advice of
his astrologer became determined to marry Jeevajothi, the young
daughter of one of his assistant managers. That would have made her
Rajagopals third simultaneous wife: In 1972, he married the mother of
his sons, and in 1994, he married the wife of one of his employees.
Jeevajothi was not interested in Rajagopal. She was in love withher brothers math tutor, Santhakumar. In 1999, Jeevajothi and
Santhakumar eloped, but Rajagopals fixation persisted he gave her
jewelry, dresses and several installments of cash to help her open a
travel agency. While Jeevajothi accepted the gifts, she continued to
resist Rajagopals advances. On Sept. 28, 2001, Rajagopal came to
Jeevajothi and Santhakumars house at midnight and warned
Santhakumar that he had two days to sever their relationship. He toldJeevajothi that his second wife, too, had at first rejected him, but now
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she was living a queen life.
The young couple tried to flee to a place where they hoped
Rajagopal wouldnt find them, but five of Rajagopals employees, led by
a restaurant manager named Daniel, intercepted them. The henchmen
forced the couple into an Ambassador car and drove them to a
Saravana Bhavan warehouse in KK Nagar, where Rajagopal appeared.
According to the courts narrative, Rajagopal hiked up his dhoti and
gave Santhakumar a beating. Jeevajothi fell at Rajagopals feet and
begged him to stop. Rajagopal told his men to take Santhakumar to the
next room and continue beating him. Jeevajothi sat in the corner and
wept.
The next day, Daniel called Jeevajothi to apologize and suggested
that she go to the police.
Though Rajagopals men held Jeevajothi and Santhakumar under
a kind of house arrest, they escaped on Oct. 12 under the pretext of
going out to attend a felicitation function for Rajagopal. Instead, they
went to the city police commissioners office to file a complaint. Six
days later, Rajagopals employees kidnapped the couple again and
forcibly separated them. They pushed Jeevajothi into a Mercedes withRajagopal, who brandished a photocopy of her police complaint and
asked her mockingly about its contents.
Jeevajothi didnt know what became of Santhakumar. He reached
her by phone two days later, telling her that Rajagopal had paid Daniel
500,000 rupees ($10,000) to kill him, but Daniel had instead let him
escape and advised him to hide out in Mumbai. She urged
Santhakumar to come home to her together, Jeevajothi said, theydplead with Rajagopal to leave them alone. It is obvious, the court
wrote, that their overwhelming love for each other persuaded them to
take the risk.
Later that night, the couple, joined by Jeevajothis parents and
brother, went to Saravana Bhavan headquarters to meet Rajagopal. He
told them to wait in a nearby room. Then he interrogated Daniel about
what happened to Santhakumar. Daniel lied and said that he had tiedhim up on a railway track, where a train ran him over, and then he
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burned his clothes. With a dramatic flourish, Rajagopal then called
Santhakumar into the room. Whos this then, he asked Daniel,
Santhakumars ghost? Daniel started beating Santhakumar there in the
office, enraged that hed revealed his betrayal of Rajagopal. Jeevajothi
and her family tried to intervene. Eventually Rajagopal and his
henchmen put them all into a van, which, according to the court, took
them to a specialist in a faraway village for removal of witchcraft.
Two days later, Rajagopals men forced Santhakumar into a car
with Daniel, and they drove north. On Oct. 31, high up in the Western
Ghats mountain range near a resort town called Kodaikanal, forest
officials discovered a body. An assistant surgeon at the local hospital
concluded in his post-mortem that the cause of Santhakumars death
was asphyxia due to throttling. The police later found the alleged
murder weapon a sarong under the seat of Daniels car.
Daniel was convicted of murder along with Rajagopal and has also
been released on bail, but I was never able to track him down.
Jeevajothi, too, has made herself impossible to find.
Three days afterI met Rajagopal in Chennai, I took a short
flight to visit the village where he grew up. Rajagopals driver picked meup, and he beamed when I asked him what the boss was like. Hes like
a living god to us, he said. He understands every problem, and he
resolves it.
The villages name has been upgraded from Punnaiadi to Punnai
Nagar, because of Rajagopals development of the area, he told me. The
bus even stops there now. In terms of population, Punnai Nagar is no
bigger than it was when Rajagopal was born. Yet the village has beentransformed. In the middle of the red-dirt moonscape, Rajagopal has
erected a surreal monument to his success, in the form of a four-acre
Saravana Bhavan campus. The centerpiece is a million-dollar Hindu
temple, which is flanked by a Saravana Bhavan restaurant that employs
140 people all for a village that has fewer than 90 homes.
A worker took me on a tour of Rajagopals house, which he built in
1994 on the spot where his childhood hut once stood, and where he hasincreasingly been spending his time. Its a huge beige block, nearly all
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of it given over to dormitory rooms for his staff. The only decorations
are pictures of gods. The worker led me to a black couch on the second
floor, and a few minutes later, Rajagopal emerged from a back room
and sat on a chair opposite me. Ganapathi Iyer was there again, as were
his assistant and his valet, who pricked Rajagopals finger for a blood-
sugar test. But this time Rajagopal was less willing to let them control
the conversation.
I asked him about a rumor that while in prison he had managed to
improve the food served by the prison canteen. You cant change
anything there, he said. I had to spend one lakh [100,000 rupees]
every month in order to get home food delivered to me.
Dont tell him about this, Iyer said to Rajagopal. Do we have to
talk about the corruption?
They should know how corrupt we are, Rajagopal said. We cant
just keep bragging that we are good all the time. The truth has to be
told.
I asked him what he likes least about his work.
I dont like employees drinking and lying, he said. If you ask me,
I dont like that I went after Jeevajothi.Sir, not that, Iyer said, just office work, office work.
Theres nothing I dislike about the work, Rajagopal said.
After a while Rajagopal said he was getting tired. As we got up to
leave, he talked about how important it was for successful villagers like
him to support the places they came from. Developing villages was
Gandhis dream, he said. I believe in Gandhi.
I asked what he admired most about Gandhi, and he laughed. Ilike that he had a girl on each arm. He turned to my translator. Tell
him that having girls around keeps a guy young forever.
Tell him these last comments were just a joke, his assistant said.
Shortly beforeI left Chennai, I met again with Rajagopals son
Saravanan. This time it was just the two of us, and we talked for hours
in the foyer outside his fathers office. Saravanan is a large but gentle
man, his husky voice rarely much louder than a whisper.He described his father as a keep-guessing character. You dont
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know what he will come up wanting, he said. A phone call comes, and
you have to be dead sure what hes asking and what youre answering.
That fear is there for everybody. Is he an intimidating boss to work for?
I asked. When he wants things done a certain way, hes quite
intimidating, Saravanan said. It has to be done at any cost.
If hed had his choice, he said, he would have become an engineer.
My dad said, No, we come from a business community you have to
study commerce. So he did two years of commerce, and then
Rajagopal told him he had to study hotel management. From there his
father assigned him to a seven-year rotation through the companys
departments: purchasing vegetables, working the graveyard shift in the
kitchen, manning a Saravana sweets shop, making ice cream, working
in maintenance and accounting and human resources.
Its clear that Saravanan never gave up his dream of becoming an
engineer he just transferred his ideas to his fathers business.
Rajagopals exacting standards were dictated by the instinct of a self-
made man. Saravanan wants to translate that instinct into a science,
and when he talks about the company thats becoming his, his
conversation is peppered with terms that would be foreign to his father,like management information system and total dissolved solids. In a
biochemical lab Saravanan set up on the top floor of the companys ice-
cream factory, he has been trying to determine the exact chemical
composition of Saravanas dishes in their ideal form, and the lab uses
this information to test daily samples from each of the companys
Chennai branches to ensure that all are supplying the same quality.
As the company continues to grow, manpower is a worry.Saravanan said he is committed to making everything from fresh
ingredients in fact, he wants to take it further, and he has been
experimenting with replacing the artificial stabilizer in Saravanas
otherwise all-natural house-brand ice cream with flaxseed. But such
cooking requires vast kitchen staffs, and as better education reaches
more and more Indians, he said, fewer workers are interested in that
kind of labor.One solution Saravanan likes is automation. Another in-house lab
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5/7/2014 Masala Dosa to Die For - NYTimes.com
is developing prototypes for everything from coffee machines to vada
fryers, according to Saravana Bhavans very particular specifications.
He recognizes, though, that the mass utility of such machines is still
years away in the meantime, personnel remains the companys most
treasured asset, so he has also systematized the hiring process. An in-
house medical team records each applicants vital statistics using
software Saravanan developed. A coffee man, he explained, should be
small and quiet, while a dosa chef needs to be at least 5-foot-6.
But he was quick to note the limits of such algorithms. Just that
morning, he said, the medical team alerted him to their concerns over a
particular applicant: They noticed that he had cigarette burns on his
forearm, apparently self-inflicted. Saravanan decided to call the man
and ask him what happened. He told me, I had a love affair, it failed,
she got married, I got agitated, Saravanan said. He made a mistake
that was a small part of his life. The company is strict, but not
unforgiving. He told the man he would hire him. And if the job worked
out, Saravana Bhavan would pay to erase his scars.
Rollo Romigis a freelance writer in Turkey. He last wrote for the magazine about the plight of
celebrity elephants in India.
Editor: Samantha Henig
A version of this article appears in print on May 11, 2014, on page MM32 of the Sunday
Magazine with the headline: Masala Dosa To Die For.
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