Excerpted from ‘OTP Please!: Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia’ by Vandana Vasudevan.

Growing up in Mussoorie, smoking was an occasional, furtive indulgence for Aarav Tiwari, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer in the Supreme Court. He would join his friends at a local paan shop and puff away, secure in the knowledge that their parents had no idea about their antics. Even in law school, about five or six years ago, he would only light up by walking to the corner shop and getting a smoke.

When he is at the court, he doesn’t carry a packet. He has a deal with the paan shop around the corner, where he has paid the panwallah for twenty cigarettes in advance. Every time he goes and smokes one or two, the pan wallah sends him a message on WhatsApp to record how many cigarettes are down, and when it is zero, Aarav renews the deal.

‘This helps me restrict my smokes because I have to make an effort to go down and buy a cigarette. If I had a packet, I would pull it out and light up.’

But at home, when he orders through a quick commerce app, one can’t order separate sticks, so it is always a complete packet. How would he have managed the late-night cravings for a cigarette without the apps?

‘Well, if the delivery system was not there and I had a craving for a smoke at midnight, I guess I would have just turned over and slept. Of course, I wouldn’t leave home and start searching for cigarettes at that hour. It would be too much of an effort.’

There’s a moment’s pause, and he admits, ‘Obviously, one smokes more, I guess. Because it has become so readily accessible.’

In a sub-Reddit group of Gurugram, a young man seeks help to escape the grip that food delivery apps seem to have on him:

‘I am a working male. I’m addicted to ordering food from Zomato & Swiggy. I have been trying to quit/keep it in check for 2 years now but to no avail. I order in almost daily even though I live with my parents and food is cooked at home. Sometimes twice a day. The ordering experience has become too smooth imo [in my opinion]. Fixing a meal for yourself takes effort, and the bland taste of home-cooked food, as compared to the junk that I order, also doesn’t help.

The repercussions are multi-pronged. This is affecting my physical, mental as well as financial health. I have tried a lot of things like uninstalling the apps, not renewing gold (membership), and eating before I’m hungry, but I end up coming back. I’m still trying. There must be others dealing with the same issue. Please share tips.’

Sub-Reddit groups in different Indian cities have threads by young working folks who are worried about health and the high prices of restaurant food, but unable or unwilling to cook. A woman in Bengaluru living in a co-living arrangement without amenities or time to cook is sick of ordering healthy food on Zomato. She asks for recommendations for a meal service that will supply mainly salads. A man in Chandigarh is worried and seeks suggestions for newer restaurants in the city to break the ennui he feels because of frequent ordering.

With delivery at one’s fingertips, it is accessible for children who have grown up with mobiles since they were toddlers. During the pandemic, Zomato sent an email targeted at children titled ‘Hey, parents not letting you order?’ encouraging kids to order food secretly. The mail helpfully provided a cheat sheet to the kids to convince their parents to let them order. One of the tips was that kids should patiently wait until their parents fell asleep, then sneak in the order and enjoy it in their room quietly.

The marketing campaign was roundly criticised for encouraging children to be sneaky and secretive. The campaign went live in August 2020 when no vaccine was in sight. Parents were angry that in their hurry to pick up the order and run in before being spotted, kids were liable to be negligent about the usual precautionary measures of sanitising the packaging surfaces.

Prof RS Khare, a pioneering sociocultural anthropologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, now eighty-seven, has written about how moderation is a fundamental gastronomic principle of the Indic civilisation. Portion control was inbuilt as it was impossible to have too much of so many dishes.

Dietary balance was embedded in the ideal of niyamita ahara or a regulated meal. Overeating was both morally undesirable and personally harmful. Fasts were a way to control meals among Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. A Buddhist monk can eat only the amount necessary to sustain life. A Jain monk is not to be bothered with taste or any aspect of the food except that it is edible and available.

From there to a whole nation ordering enough biryanis in 2023 via Zomato to fill eight Qutub Minars, as the company humorously noted that year, we have indeed come a long way.

Published in special arrangement with TheWire.in

OTP Please!: Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia

Author: Vandana Vasudevan

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

Year: 2025