The Extraordinary ‘Walas’ Of India
- Sandhya Agrawal
- Feb 26, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 13, 2020
The month-end and our financial burden are directly proportional, and so is our need to eat. But eating is something else and eating to make yourself full is something else. Sometimes you might eat from a fancy restaurant, spend hundreds of bucks and still feel empty while sometimes you eat from a street vendor or paratheWALA and can't feel your stomach. So here we know everyone always prefers that food which serves your hunger and similarly, Mr Mir Alam, a parathawala near a college area of Bhubaneswar has solved this problem of students.
Students call him Alam bhaiya and his food as Alam bhaiya ke parathe. The stall of Mr Alam is always filled with broke students or just students who want to eat. He explains that his booth is filled with students during the lunch hour and evenings. He even thinks that students prefer his food as they get lousy hostel food while the reality is that students prefer him because of several reasons which include the cost, the time in which it is prepared, and of course the excellent taste of it. Mr Alam explains that "sometimes students call me from their classes and asks to make parathas so that they can just come and eat them and it feels beautiful as I feel proud that I am feeding people as they want.
When asked about how online payments have made his business comfortable and smooth, he said that "It has helped me in several ways and one of them remains that I no longer have to worry about keeping the change. Sometimes students fail to bring money or server is down. They pay me later from their hostels as they are my regular customers, I am from Jajpur district of Odisha, and I got settled here so that I could earn for my family. This place has allowed me to do that and now these students are my life if I don't see them for one day then it feels empty because when they eat my parathas and Maggi, I see their happy faces which are a good feeling."
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