The Hindu Business Line : Where brands matter, and don’t

Two minute-noodles, thick and sliceable like a moist cake. It’s the second best thing I like having in the mountains. First is a cup of tea. There is, however, a difference between the two. Compared to noodles, tea has a generic taste of satisf action within which the finer distinctions require tea tasters and advertisements to articulate. Wilderness strips your life to essentials. “I love tea” is an eminently believable sentiment at altitude. “I love Taj Mahal” or “I love Tata Tea” is product promotion.

With tea or coffee, you just want the taste, warmth and ambience. Not so with noodles because it’s got to be ready double quick, nobody else makes it like Maggi and even if they do, no brand reaches that far up remote trails as Maggi does. In the mountains (not hill stations) companies don’t push products. People come down, pick up things and carry it on their back or as mule loads. The Indane gas cylinder had thus doubled in cost a day’s drive plus long hike from Bageshwar but those noodles were still Rs 20 a plate four days’ walk away, near the Pindari Glacier. That’s less than Rs 10 as labour cost for cooking, serving and finally washing the dishes in ice-cold water.

A gas cylinder becomes a ‘Tata-Bajaj’ venture

Tara Singh’s kitchen cupboard at Paradise Cottage in Khati village showcased the ubiquitous yellow packet well. A large rack was packed with Maggi noodles. The biscuits were Bonn, not Britannia. It didn’t seem to matter which brand that was. As for the tea, it was way too local for me to even remember. Probably riding piggy back on the Maggi channel, two packets of Nescafe and some packets of Every Day milk powder had made it up. Maybe that’s another reason for the popularity of the yellow packet - the same channel serving noodles gets you coffee, milk powder and chocolates. For those adventuring on a carefully extended leash from the plains, the yellow packets provide familiarity. For those consciously abandoning the plains, the yellow packets are sheer convenience. As you move up from camp to camp on a mountain, you choose to shed weight, replacing the rice and dal with instant food. Maggi is relief in a way few other brands are. Rather strange that Nestle’s campaign for the product only recently graduated from childish, adolescent fun to food.

From plains to mountains, shops tell stories. The most obvious one is the transformation in character. Crowded metros aid specialisation. Small worlds are sufficiently excavated to be huge. As you drift towards difficult, remote terrain, the specialisation expands to a case of bracketing – articles of near similar use find place in the same shop. Then the bracket broadens to a sort of local super store where you get as much of everything as can be packed into a small shop. Eventually, higher and higher up a trail these commando units peter off till all you have left are the odd tents or shacks serving generic tea, rice, roti, branded noodles and vegetable curry dominated by the tough potato. At this point, like the extreme gravity in a black hole, even the shop definition collapses – the same outlet provides you tea, food and if required, a bed for the night. Further up the model graduates in minimalism through the stone huts of shepherds to the tent and supplies in your rucksack. There are exceptions to this retail evolution. Notebooks for one; till medium altitudes, I have found them sold through dedicated shops. Occasionally, innovation shows. The tent-restaurant en route to Stok Kangri in Ladakh had cold stream water diverted to a pit within. It was refrigerator, serving chilled soft drinks, even beer.

Another change with altitude is in branding. At the shop behind Khati’s Jai Nanda restaurant, a small gas cylinder sat branded Tata-Bajaj. In the plains, the two business houses competed in automobiles and neither sold cooking gas. Here, some enterprising mind had brought them together on the face of a gas cylinder. In remote markets where copyright is more the right to copy, known brands become the stuff of secondary endorsement. Nokia was stamped on a cleaning brush. The Finns needn’t be upset for mobile phones and motorcycles featured prominently in the image of urban well-being the villagers coveted. Music to marketers but I would definitely miss something in mountains totally lost to urbanisation. There’s something charming about a world where Tata-Bajaj means cooking gas, Nokia is the stuff of bristles and Maggi is home in a yellow packet. Not to mention that mountain stream for a fridge and notebook shops enduring abject loneliness.

(The writer is a freelancer based in Mumbai.)