The Indian restaurants in Tokyo probably never had it so good, at least
as far as an Indian clientele is concerned. This is directly related to
the growth in the number of affluent 20-30 year old Indian tech personnel,
who have become ubiquitous in all the major financial institutions and
other big corporations around the world cities. They're well paid, even
though negligible when compared to the money paid to the mostly white Anglo-Saxon
yuppie traders for whom they write the codes, it allows them to afford
the cutthroat prices for a Navaratna korma etc., in these Injun restaurants.
Still, why do they do this? Why not go to a Chinese noodle shop or a Japanese
izakaya? The answer is that, most of these people are -what I'm going to
call- the 'HIPPIES'. Not the hippies of yore, who roamed dusty streets
in remote Indian towns searching for existential bliss in the smoke rising
out of hashish weeds. These are the new age HIPPIES - Hindu InfoTech Professionals.
It's not that there are no Christian or Muslim InfoTech guys from India,
but just that the majority are Hindus. Many of them are from conservative
middleclass Hindu families where meat dishes are restricted to chicken
and mutton (unless you're from Kerala where meat dishes can be anything
from frog leg to flying squirrel). To ask these people to go to an Izakaya
and have horseflesh and octopus tentacles with seaweed will be akin to
asking cricketers to stop fixing matches. Anyway, this means that the only
safe bet for many of them is an Indian restaurant where sautéed vegetables
will never have beef shreds in them (as my friend, fresh off the plane,
found out in a restaurant in a remote Japanese village, many moons ago).
For the guys running the restaurant, the presence of Indians give an air of authenticity to the otherwise banal stuff they serve the unsuspecting Japanese patrons as real Indian food. I have been asked time and again by many Japanese friends about the best Indian restaurant in town, and always I have had to hum and haw trying to give a positive answer. Most of them are average and they sell food that is not what I’d eat at home in Ananthapuri. Maybe a lot of North Indians do eat Chicken Dopyaaz and Mutton bhuna at home. Why only Do pyaaz? Why not char? Was this the reason for the onion crisis some time back? People just decided to make and eat chicken char pyaaz instead of the regular two. Who knows? These are times of plenty, it seems. Meanwhile, the average Indian -who is not counted by the politicians and businesses when they talk about 'the average Indian'- can take heart in the fact that the menu also has his staple, the real Indian food – the Ekratna Korma known as boiled dal, prominently displayed, thereby connecting him and his slum to the "global" village. Bon appetit.