I’ve seen so many of those TV programs where they show how things are made: Machines that squish cream into Twinkies, machines that roll paper around crayons, machines that put the precise number of M&Ms into every package.
So I tend to assume that everything is done by machine — and I’m always shocked when I discover honest-to-god handmade items.
Like incense. Did you know there’s a little girl sitting on a mat in a hallway, rolling incense right this very second? She rolls up to 4,000 sticks per day.
Once she’s done, the incense is dried on a rooftop, then another woman dips the sticks into various pots of oil and colored powder. From that point, it is packaged and put up for sale.
I also stopped by a beedi factory, which is where men make Indian cigarettes. Leaves from the tendu tree are chopped into rectangles, filled with tobacco flake, rolled and tied with a thin piece of pink string.
Each worker makes approximately three beedies in the time it takes for me to blink.
Thousands of cigarettes per day are rolled by these guys and exported all over Asia and the world.
And it all begins right here, in a dirty room with a rusty fan, crowded with men who sit on the floor all day long and take home a handful of rupees.
Thankfully, there is no machine for what they do.
