For over more than a millenia India has been reagrded as a land of spices and condiments by the rest of the world. Back then the spice trades were existing between our country and Europe through land routes. It was a long and arduous journey. Europeans were aware that it will be comparatively faster and easier to get the spices via ships and were struggling to establish sea routes as they had no idea how to reach the land of India via sea. The king of Portugal assigned one of his wealthy courtiers with this ambitious task. His name was Vasco-da-gama. It was the year of 1498 when he successfully docked his ship on the port of Calicut ( now Kozhikode).
Vasco-da-gama’s ships had taken a full year to reach India and its valuable spices— the very same spices you can order online.
My readers will recall reading a small piece I wrote a few weeks ago about a passionate Indian travel vlogger Mr. Harish Bali. His YouTube channel Visa2Explore has more than 1.8 million subscribers. Harishji tirelessly explores through the length and breadth of India, sharing with viewers not only distinctive geographical diversity of our vast and beautiful country but also its native cultures, craftsmanships, and the local food that we often watch him savour with delight. (This December he is visiting Gujarat for a week, he has already explored the state in some of his older videos as well.)
Even before Vocal for Local became trendy Harish Bali has been sharing awareness of local produce and crafts in his videos.
Harish Bali makes it a point to share his thoughts and ideas in the subscribers’ meet he regualerly arranges with his viewers in various places he is visiting. One such idea was to make and share detailed online maps of the travel circuits, with nearby excursions and places of interest included, so that travellers going all the way to a particular point in country can make use of the knowledge and get easy references for their plans. Maps rich with detailed information like how many days to plan, how to reach there, what kind of transport is available, what amenities to expect, what local food to explore and more. An expensive and time consuming effort. He invested a few lakhs of his own but had to finally give up that project.
Another project of his is currently under way. Harish Bali is launching a new website: spice2nuts. An e-commerce website that sources authentic spices, masalas, dried fruits and nuts etc, qaulity checked for you and delievered at your doorstep at the best prices.
In most cases these will be sourced directly from the farmers. This way most of the profit can go to the men and women growing the produce and the middlemen exploiting the farmers can be deleted from the equation. Naturally, when the middlemen-agents etc are omitted it also becomes more reasonably priced for the ultimate buyer— you and me.
This is a noble thought. Harish Bali is known for his honesty and integrity. In the world of YouTube it is a common practice for content makers to make the videos that are covertly sponsored by hotels, restaurants, cruise ships, shops etc etc. Such content makers conveniently forget to relay this vital information to their viewers. Harish Bali is an exceptional vlogger who refrains from making this kind of money. He is happy to earn the legitimate monetisation sum that comes from the views that his 1.8 million viewers give his videos. Most of that income goes into paying for his camera and editing team and for the actuals of travelling. What remains after that is what makes his home function. If he is able to save, his savings are not so big as to get invested in some big house or swanky car. In one of his subscriber meets he had roughly summed up his income verses expenses structure for a subscriber.
India produces very good qaulity of dozens of spices like black pepper, cinammon, cloves, saffron, nutmeg, cardamom, cumin (jeera), fennel (saunf), pink salt, chlli, ginger powder, black salt etc. And varoius dried fruits and nuts like cashew, almonds, figs, pistachios, walnuts etc etc are a regional specialties of this country. Bali’s regular travelling and deep interest has made him well equinted to this. In one of his very popular videos he has shown in detail the whole process of making cashews from nonedible to eldible nuts.
Soon these spices, dry fruits, nuts and condiments etc will be availble to buy from Spice2nuts website. The site will also share additional information like medicinal uses and ayurvedic nature of the particular spice (eg. black pepper) etc. I have suggested him to also put a recipe card along with pictures if possible of how the locals use that particular ingredient to make some dish specific to that region. It will be added fun for the buyer to try making that dish with the same ingredient from that region. However that is easy to suggest but added burden for him to execute.
I am eager to place my first online order of any 5 spices/nuts in home delivery when Spice2nuts is launched ( as you may know, 5 is considered a lucky omen in our culture). It will be my regular spices so I will know how good they are to the ones I have at home, I suppose the main difference will be that the new ones will be closer to organic. Knowing Harishji’s dilligent nature we can easily expect that Spice2nuts will have stuff that will pass the quality benchmark with flying colours and at the same time be reasonably priced as well. And in case something is more expensive than what we usually pay, to be fair we can trust him that it must be of the higher quality and worth the difference in price. More so because Harishji’s website will be dismissing middlemen and paying directly to the farmer for his care and toil in a fairtrade model of bussiness.
I whole heartedly wish his new venture all the very best. May his endeavor of using his popularity as a link between the common man and the common farmer of India see splendid success. He deserves it because he could have encashed his popularity for personal gains and quick money also, but instead he is choosing the higher path, the road less travelled.
DEAR SIR,
PLEASE ENGLISH ARTICAL NE GUJARATI MA TRANSLET KARONE.
REQUEST CHE. YOU ARE SIMPLY & TRULY SUPERB.