'Chips' out here are actually crisps and chips are called 'finger chips'.....Today we went a small 'chips' (crisp) factory in the middle of a slum area where Sreeni used to live and work. Sreeni was keen to take us there as his roots are there. Many of the friends he grew up with live there and work at the chip factory (factory is a bit grand really!).
I took the kids and Sarah chilled at home. The factory was in the middle of a stack of very basic, humble houses (again, houses is too grand a word really). The owner is mate of Sreeni's.
The factory if actually just one big room in a house but it turns out hundreds of kilos of chips every day for sale through Bangalore.
The potatoes are all peeled by hand at 5am in the morning. The cook guy holds about 3/4 spuds in his hand and slices them on one of these contraptions you see on the shopping channels in Sky! Sreeni told me that when he worked here if they sliced their fingers, then they have to put chilli poweder in the cut and cover it up and continue. No time to stop!
Cooking of the crisps is all done in a huge wok type thing (see pic) and starts at 7am and goes on all through the day til about 5/6pm.
Once the chips/crisps are cooked they go into a huge sack ready for taking over to the 4 guys that sit on the floor all day packing the crisps into tiny crisp bags ready for sending out.
For me this place typified India. Due to lack of money etc everything is done manually and therefore takes 3/4 times the lenght of time to do if you had a factory of some kind - or at least an electric potato peeler...They just use a normal knife! I guess if everything was automated then so many people would be out of jobs too which is just not an option with a population the size of India's which in 2007 stood at 1,129,866,154. Bangalore City alone has a population of 5,280,000!!
