DABBAWALLAS

The Lunch Box is built around the extraordinary tradition, in Mumbai, of an elaborate network of delivery men -- dabbawallas -- who each day pick up multi-tiered lunchboxes filled by wives and grandmothers with homecooked delicacies and deliver them to the desks of office workers in the sprawling city's commercial districts.  Without ever having heard of this institution before, I nonetheless inferred, correctly, that it is real, and not a concoction of a film-maker's fancy.  My old friend, Professor Emeritus Alan Wertheimer [all my old friends seem to be emeriti these days] sent me an email with links to several stories about the dabbawallas, as they are called.  Here is a NY TIMES story from seven years ago.  I consider it nothing short of miraculous that tens of thousands of lunchboxes reach their intended targets each day and return home that afternoon to be filled for tomorrow's lunch.

In his email message, Alan noted that I made no mention of the funniest joke in the movie.  I shall refrain from repeating it.

By the way, the movie seems to me to have taken its central idea from that fine old film, 84 Charing Cross Road, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, but maybe not.