When the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit India, the news all around us was debilitating. I remember sitting completely shaken and feeling helpless. I wanted to help but didn’t know where to start. A dear friend then told me, “Why don’t you use something you are passionate about as a means for helping people?” Well, neither Manchester United nor Roman history were very helpful to people. Then it hit me, I absolutely enjoyed cooking. Seeing people enjoy the food I cook has always given me great joy. This is how the idea for Meals for Madras (MFM) was born.
I started making meals for families who were in quarantine in my neighbourhood due to COVID. I posted about it on social media, and the response was something I never anticipated. My friend Deepthi immediately reached out saying she would like to start doing this in the ECR area. By the end of day 1, we had 12 incredible home cooks on board. This community of cooks kept growing by the day and at our zenith we had over 150 home cooks on Meals for Madras, and we served over 700 meals per day.
These men and women expected nothing in return. All they wanted to do was ensure a delicious home-cooked meal was available to their fellow Chennai makkal. We didn’t realize how much difference a home cooked meal could make in someone’s life before we started this initiative. The people we served were hearty in their praise. They would tell us that they were eagerly looking forward to see what each day’s meal box would contain. In fact, a few people whom we served later joined us as home cooks once they recovered.
This community helped us raise over Rs 16 lakh. We used this in a partnership with a wonderful caterer and sent meals to people who couldn’t reach us. We served over 500 conservancy workers, sanitation staff, the homeless and anyone else who depended on roadside eateries every day. Through the sheer power of a community that came together for a common cause.
This community was not a concerted effort to do something massive and create a quantum change in society. This was just every day, normal people who organically bonded together. Our mandate changed and evolved over time. Even though the second wave was raging and each one of us was affected in some way or the other, the community never faltered. If one cook couldn’t fulfill the orders they had taken, there were two others to step in. We had one goal, if we told someone we will send them food, we weren’t going to let them down. These home cooks even worked through May’s intense complete lockdown, creating meal plans and coming up with recipes that maximized the resources they had stocked up. The meals were well thought-out, rich in nutrients and a dish was rarely repeated. Somehow the community also became a repository of recipes as well. There were people from all over the country and family recipes were shared with pride and replicated by others and enjoyed. The whole of Chennai benefitted.
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For me, this initiative was a microcosm of our nation as a whole. Not only in terms of diversity, but also in terms of people who had never met each other pulling off something no one expected. Some home cooks would be cooking for 10 people apart from their own families. A senior citizen in their neighbourhood would call and they wouldn’t bat an eyelid before taking another two people on. No one told them they had to. We always said we do what we can and if we have to say no to someone, as tough it was, it had to be done. I can say with pride that a no was rare.
People would send food to far-flung areas and not even charge the recipient for the delivery charges. They would tell us, “They are already going through COVID, I don’t want to bother them more”. The MFM family was as varied as it gets. Architects, software engineers, chartered accountants, filmmakers, homemakers, even doctors. Tamilians, Bengalis, Malayalis, Kannadigas, Punjabis. Men, women and their children. Millennials, boomers and even some Gen X-ers. People who love pineapple on pizza, people who detest coffee, people who don’t have a fixed side of thehel bed they sleep on, people who swear by Breaking Bad, people who have never watched Game of Thrones. We had them all. All of us had one thing in common though. We loved food. We loved cooking, talking about and eating food. Most of all, we loved it when we could bring some much-needed joy to our own countrymen going through COVID.
Harshini Sreedhar, a sales professional at CISCO, ran Meals for Madras, an initiative to provide free food to COVID patients in Chennai. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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