Thursday, April 24, 2014

India elections: Tamil Nadu chief Jayalalithaa feeds goodwill with five-rupee meals...

Every morning, at 3am, the kitchens round the back of the Rajiv Gandhi government general hospital in the southern Indian city of Chennai come to life. Forty cooks light the gas cookers and start sorting 185kg of rice.

At 7am the first of the 4,000 daily customers surge in. Porters, rickshaw drivers, nurses, patients, students, bureaucrats, doctors and itinerant holy men all stand to eat their heavily subsidised meals, priced at no more than 5 rupees (5p) and eaten at ferocious speed with fingers from tin plates.

Everyone, cooks and consumers alike, knows who to thank for their almost free meal: Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu state.

This and 202 other eating places in Chennai – all set up over the last 14 months and all hugely popular – are known as "Amma canteens". Amma, or mother, is one of the local names for the chief minister. "Great Revolutionary Leader" is another.

The 43-year-old chief cook, A Malathi, said: "This [canteen] is like a temple for her. We will all vote for her, and so will our families, and so will all the customers." Full story...

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