Kamal Ghorui
I remember running down the stairs in my aunt’s house as fast as I could; the counting was getting faster, signalling that the end was nigh. We were playing hide and seek, and it was my older, bigger, faster cousin’s turn to find me. I ran past the courtyard, staying close to the wall to avoid being seen from upstairs, and pushed on a closed door. It gave way, and I stepped in and hastily closed the door. The windows seemed shuttered, and I couldn’t find the light switch, but in feeling my way around, I had the sense that the walls were strangely clammy, with a layer of dust on them.
But I was safe; my cousin ran past the door, and I could hear him go back up. After an appropriate delay, I came out and yelled to announce my victory, which is when my aunt saw me and gave out a cry of horror. I was apparently so covered with coal dust that only my eyes could be seen. It was their coal-room where I had taken shelter. Cooking happened on a large coal-burning clay oven built into their kitchen wall, and next to it was a coal-room where giant slabs of coal were stored and broken into the right-sized chunks when needed. It was messy and polluting but also cheap and convenient; the burners were large enough to accommodate the giant cauldrons of water that had to be boiled for the rice to feed a joint family of 20 or more.
This was still the 1960s, and gas stoves were a novelty; we had one, but my mother prided herself for being at the technological edge, “After all, I am an engineer’s daughter,” she would say with a smile that touched her eyes but barely moved her mouth. There was much discussion about these stoves in the living rooms: are they safe — not entirely, it turned out: there were occasional cylinder explosions and leaks that went on for too long and turned into a fire. There were also these awful stories of saris catching fire, but the fact that they were very often young married women, and there was sometimes a vague cloud of dowry conflict around them, hinted at possibilities other than a pure accident.
There were also, inevitably, questions about whether the food would taste right. Over extended visits to houses that used coal, I discovered that the embers took a long time to fully extinguish themselves, and a peapod or pepper or potato stuck into them could be collected some hours later, cooked, charred, and smoky, delicious with a pinch of salt and a drizzle of mustard oil. That would not be an option with the gas stove, which went off as soon as the knob was turned. On the other hand, gas stoves were quick: the oil would heat up fast, making it possible to put together a quick batch of kachoris for the unexpected guest. I pride myself as a fast cook, but the speed at which my aunts and their generation could produce a delicious kachori or loochi (the Bengali, all-maida version of a puri, all starch and fat and deliciousness) with a sabzi of potatoes or cauliflower, was something else (I know one person, nearing 90, who still does that when I visit).
Still, gas was clearly the coming thing. As the joint family fragmented and people moved to small flats with smaller kitchens and limited exhausts, the fact that gas was much cleaner and took less space became a prime consideration. But it was still expensive and rationed; there were these days when the gas ran out, and the next cylinder was not forthcoming. We heard reports of housewives bribing and/or sweet-talking the gas-man to hand someone else’s quota over to them. And for many, joint families for instance, one cylinder per month just was not enough. For example, the nice woman who ran a small street-side eatery (maacch-bhat-dal-sabzi 15 rupees, 3 rupees less if you take duck egg curry instead of fish) in our neighborhood stuck to her portable coal-burning stove and a kerosene burner until the end of the 1980s. The sweet and pungent fragrance of well-fried onion paste from her maaccher jhol that I would smell in passing (I always thought I would eat there one day, but I never did) was often drowned by the acrid vapours from burning kerosene.
But as foreign exchange became less tight and gas connections more easily available, even my aunt’s very conservative in-laws bowed to the inevitable. Today, there are 32 crore LPG (cylinder gas) connections in India, plus more than 1 crore who enjoy the convenience of piped gas. Of these, about 10 crore are covered under the government’s Ujjwala scheme, which offers a subsidy of about 20% to lower-income households, with the reasonable idea that gas cooking is less polluting than the coal, cow-dung or twigs that the poor end up using, and therefore better both for the world and for the cook and her family. I suspect our neighborhood eatery, if it still exists, has now switched to gas, along with most roadside vendors.
But gas is also a huge burden on the economy; we import a large majority of our LPG supply, and 90% of those imports came through the Strait of Hormuz. Which is why the internet is now full of stories and memes about what happens when gas runs out. The current crisis will end, but if the players in the oil futures market are to be trusted, not very soon. For those not steeped in the vocabulary of modern finance, futures markets offer the option of buying some number of barrels of oil today, for delivery in May or June or even next January. If traders in the market, which include a lot of professionals who use large quantities of oil, expect the crisis to end soon, the prices for May delivery would be substantially below current prices, which alas, they are not. Nor are June prices that much lower; July looks better, but still 50% higher than in December 2025, before Messrs Trump and Netanyahu started this mess. In fact, even in January 2027, the market suggests oil prices will be 20% higher than in December 2025.
Market experts have been wrong before, even very wrong (for full disclosure, I write this while preparing a lecture on stock market idiocies), but the market price has the advantage of aggregating large numbers of opinions, so it might be the best we can do. If we take seriously what the futures markets are saying, the war might end (Trump seems to be getting some heat in that direction), but the overall hostilities will take longer to sort out. And even if Iran continues to be nice to “friend India” which is nice of them, given our tepid response to the unilateral declaration of war by the Americans and Israelis (indeed, Bibi was clearly applying final touches to this plan between hugs with PM Modi), if the global price of energy stays up by say 20% as the markets suggest, we, as one of the biggest buyers of both petroleum and natural gas, will end up with a big problem. As we know, despite assurances from the government that everything is under control, poor people are going without meals (perhaps because of panic buying by those who have the wherewithal to do so). What the numbers imply is that even if the flow of gas eases, so that those who are willing to pay will be able to get the cylinders they desire, prices of petrol, diesel and domestic LPG are all about to go up.
Maybe I am cynical, but after the election results, seems like a reasonable guess about when that will happen. When it happens, the prices of food will unfortunately follow suit, since they are closely linked to transport costs and the world’s poor will once again pay for Donald Trump’s misplaced machismo.
The point is not to blame the government for this particular global catastrophe, but to underscore that it is one more reason to hasten our move away from petroleum dependence. And not towards coal, please — our air is already among the worst in the world and killing many millions. The move towards renewables is, in fact, happening, but in the meanwhile, there is no reason not to encourage individuals to do their bit. Solar power from a solar panel that charges a battery is by now familiar enough in much of India that a policy push, aided by the current crisis, may make a big difference. For cooking, there are the inexpensive solar box cookers that mostly function as slow cookers, but also cooktops connected to a solar panel and a battery, which can be used, like any other electric burner, to fry kachoris or fuel a pressure cooker. A part of the reason why everyone does not have one already is that they are not cheap (Rs 15,000 or more). Adopting the pay-as-you-go model, where clients make monthly payments while using the energy source until their loan is paid off (it gets disabled remotely if the loan repayments stop), will make it easier to overcome this barrier, and perhaps those loans could be subsidised. A number of studies from across the world suggest that these pay-as-you-go models generate high repayment rates and that subsidies speed up adoption.
But even the cheaper box cookers can produce an excellent dal-chawal, I am told, to which I want to add the wonderful bati-chorchori, a melange of vegetables (and perhaps shrimps) cooked in their own juices inside a closed container placed in the pot where rice or dal was cooking. Even if you still use the gas burner, say, to fry up some pakoras, going half-solar will keep the cylinder going for a few more weeks, and reduce our carbon footprint in the bargain.
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