Alwarpet’s Five rupee Annachi

Multi-millionaire Ganesan, who serves lunches for five rupees at his tea stall, believes that the rags-to-riches story of his life could serve as the plot of a super-hit movie

Bhuvanesh Chandar

(Originally written on 08/03/2020 as a part of my curriculum in ACJ)

“I’m a multi-millionaire. We struggled for years, but when it was our time, it took us to many great heights”, says the self-proclaimed millionaire, Ganesan, who even today, sleeps for hardly two to three hours every night and gets up to prepare a special meal that costs only five rupees. “People advise me nowadays to just stay home and take rest, but I respond saying that I’ll take rest once and for all in the end and not now”, he says.

Ganesan, 62, is well known in Alwarpet as “5 Ruba Kadai Annachi”, for selling five rupee lunches at his Lakshmi Tea Stall, at C.P.Ramasamy Road in Alwarpet. In Tamil, Ruba means Rupees; Kadai means a shop; and Annachi denotes an elderly merchant from the Nadar community. He has been cooking and serving this lunch for over 26 years and the reputation his shop holds in the locality is evident from the sheer crowd that flocks the shop between 12 noon and 1 PM.

Annachi is someone who would yell at his waiter for the delay, and continue narrating the story with the same wide grin. Sitting as a cashier in his shop, he laughs out loud while talking about how the idea to serve lunches at such a low price came about. “One of my workers, Sekar, was working as a domestic help for a Brahmin family and it was them who suggested this idea – to serve packets of sambar rice, curd rice, tamarind rice, lemon rice and so on for a meagre price – to us.”

But how does he get such a profit by charging such a meagre price? “Because it sells!!. I sell this lunch for about Rs4000 (800 packs a day). For rice I pay Rs1000 per bag, for curd, I pay Rs300 for 5 litres; I pay Rs250 for tomatoes, and the lemon for lemon rice costs around Rs50. For sambar and chutney, we just use what we cook for the fast food shop. The total expenses are way less than the revenue we get. This entire revenue structure is such, only because of the business that it regularly gets”

Annachi also owns Lakshmi Fast Food shop, which has two branches, and a Lakshmi Farm Fresh vegetable shop near the locality. However, the tea stall seems to be very close to his heart as he reminisces about his early days and how he set up the stall. Hailing from Eppodumvendran, a village 25 kilometres from Thoothukudi, Ganesan and his family relocated to Chennai when he was 9-years-old. “I studied only till fifth grade and then I dropped out of my school. I used to work for free at a grocery shop.” It was at this time when Ganesan picked up the tricks of the trade. “After I got married, I set up a vegetable shop at the market and with the profit I made there, I leased out this tea shop. It was 1994, and M.K.Stalin had become the mayor of Chennai. He had proposed a scheme under which the tenders for Tea shops should be decided in the form of an auction. In such an auction, the auctioneers quoted a price of Rs28 per square feet for this shop, and I bought it”

From there, the very economical revenue structure has helped Annachi to grow into the rich merchant that he is now – so much so – that he’s spending most of the year traveling around the globe. With a bashful look on his face, he goes on to state the countries he has visited, – a living testimony to the fact that a chai wala can climb the ladder and travel around the globe. “From London to Rome, we (the family) went on a 10-city trip. We have been to Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, China and Germany. We’re travelling to US this May.”

Wearing a white shirt, with a button open, and a white lungi, he points towards his wrists and says, “I don’t even wear a watch. I don’t like people who show off their expensive watches, or wear ten rings on their ten fingers.” Being a rich merchant hasn’t forced him out of the “simple, minimalistic life” that he seems to like. 

If one would were to imagine that a man of his means – who has ten workers working for him – would just sit at a corner of his shop and oversee the operations, they would be surprised to get a glimpse of his schedule. Annachi wakes up at four in the morning and goes to the tea shop half an hour later. He then serves there until his helpers arrive. By then the load of fresh vegetables arrive and Ganesan, along with his workers, begin segregating the vegetables. Fresh vegetables are chopped into pieces, while the rice is boiled in a huge boiling pot. “Then we’d prepare sambar, poriyal, kootu and so on and we would have work till 11 AM. Between 11 AM and 12 noon, the cooked meals are packed into small packets of banana leaves.”

Ganesan certainly has had his own testing times, but the years have been kinder to him. “We were, literally, “the platform class”. I’ve seen all the struggles one could imagine. Ask my son and he’ll let you know how much he hated the ration rice that we used to eat.”

He might be a bit hesitant to talk about the specifics of those dark days, but looking back, Ganesan feels that all he has this 26 years, is the name, the title and the prestige, and says that “nothing else matters”.

“We’re very happy now. Imagine how you’d feel if you grew up having nothing, and then you have everything you thought of and beyond. Imagine” – he says, with a grin that shows no sign of fading