There are some daily occurrences that seem so ordinary, I had simply stopped noticing them. The tiffin house around the corner. The coconut vendor outside the metro station. The stationery shop that somehow stocks everything from strawberry scented sketch pens to posters of Puneet Rajkumar. I think it’s probably because I know where they are without looking them up.

But off late, I am interested in the ordinary. The mundane and the less exciting. And the more I look at it, the more extraordinary it actually reveals itself to be. In Bengaluru, there’s one experience that quietly belongs on this list: the hot chips shop.

As someone who only moved here two summers ago, I found myself wondering why they happen to be everywhere. Beside supermarkets, opposite schools, next to temples, malls, and bus stops. They look remarkably similar, featuring a bright signboard, perfectly arranged interiors, some adorned with images of goddesses and gods, others with posters of posing film stars. The store design has a standard format that proudly displays glass shelves vertically stacked with thinly sliced potato crisps, crunchy banana chips, swirling murukku, spiced kodubale, sweet rose cookies and other savoury chivda. Just two steps outside the kiosk, there is usually an individual expertly slicing and frying potatoes in a large wok of bubbling oil. An ardent task to an outsider but a daily routine for the fryer, come rain, come sunshine.

The more I noticed them, the more I realised they weren’t just snack shops. They were neighbourhood businesses and hubs. Small enterprises that had quietly become part of the city’s everyday rhythm, its food history and cultural identity.

Then there’s the name. And what’s in a name?

‘Hot Chips’ began as a way of describing freshly fried chips, distinguishing them from packaged alternatives. Over time, particularly across Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, the phrase evolved into something much bigger. It became shorthand for an entire format—the friendly snack shop around the block where nibbles are sold by weight, where freshness matters more than branding and where regular customers matter more than footfall. In an era where names are trademarked, protected and fiercely defended, it’s oddly refreshing that ‘Hot Chips’ has come to function almost like a common noun. Every neighbourhood seems to have one, each with its own identity, despite sharing the same name. And none of them go out of business!

Perhaps that’s why so many of these shops look familiar. The formula works and it doesn’t require reinvention every season. It just needs discipline. Behind every warm packet of freshly cooked chips, is a business built on timing, judgement and routine. Every batch is a calculation and every kilogram of potatoes carries a cost.

At 23, Manoj has already spent 7 years learning the craft of perfecting the perfect wafer chip and the business of selling it too.

His father started the shop 15 years ago. Today, the family runs multiple hot chips outlets across Bengaluru, supported by a small production unit in Chickpet. What began as a single store has steadily grown into a family enterprise, one built without investors, delivery apps or marketing campaigns. Tucked between Phoenix Marketcity and Singayyanapalya Metro Station lies his shop: Sri Ganapathi Hot Chips.

My colleague Akshara and I made a quick stop to interview Manoj and his brother.

Your father started this business. What made you join it? 

Yes. My father started this shop and he still runs it. My brother and I help him. From an early age itself, we just wanted to continue what he built.

Did you ever imagine a different future for yourself?

No. I never had that desire. This chip shop is what I wanted to manage all along. It might sound strange, but I’ve always felt this is where I belong. My father built this business and I want to take it forward. That’s my dream.

You say that very confidently.

Because this is what I enjoy. Some people like travelling and some people like playing cricket. I like making chips and I treat this shop like my God. Nothing comes before it.

What does an ordinary day look like?

I come at 10 in the morning. First we clean the shop, the counters, the vessels. Everything has to be cleaned and washed before we begin. Then we prepare the potatoes. I scrub them and peel them. Around noon we fry the first batch and then in the evening we make another batch. We wrap up and close around 11 in the night and the next day we do it all over again.

Does the routine ever get repetitive?

No. Each day is the same but different. When you’ve been doing it for years, you know what needs to happen and when. Things fall into place and it is all in all satisfying.

How do you know how much to make every day?

You learn with time. School holidays are quieter but when schools reopen, business becomes busy again. Weekends are always better. One has to develop patience to observe and learn these things. Time and our customers have taught us that. And before you know it, you begin to understand the community. School students stop by after class or families come to pick up snacks for the evening or office-goers drop in on their way home. Sometimes we get big bulk orders from companies and restaurants for birthdays. Over time, customers become predictable enough to shape production itself.

Do you make everything fresh?

Yes yes, always. We don’t keep old stock because the oil can go rancid. Morning we make one batch. Evening we make another. We only make what we know will sell.

What happens behind the counter and what else do most people not know?

There’s a lot happening behind the counter. We have multiple shops and a single production unit. Some snacks are made there and brought here. And some, like these potato chips, are made fresh in this shop.

Is it a profitable business?

A hundred grams of chips costs ₹50. On an average day, the shop brings in between ₹5,000 and ₹6,000 in sales. Against that are potatoes, oil, spices, transport, rent and wages. Profit is less and expenses are more but we save a little.

Then what keeps you going?

Customers. When they eat the chips and tell us they’re good, we feel happy. When they come back again, we feel happy. When we get a big order for a birthday or a company, we feel even happier. That’s what makes this work worth doing.

What do you hope this business becomes?

We already have a few shops and slowly we want to expand but we’re in no rush build more. We’re already quite happy and content in a way but there’s always more to look forward to.

Cities often celebrate their biggest companies and newest ideas.

But they’re equally shaped by businesses like these. The ones that become so reliable, so embedded in everyday life, that we miss noticing them altogether. Perhaps that’s the real story of Bengaluru’s hot chips shops. Not that they sell good chips. But that they’ve quietly built one of the city’s most enduring business models, one area at a time.

Tomorrow morning, before most of us have thought about our first snack of the day, someone will already be peeling potatoes, heating oil and preparing the first batch that we unconsciously end up munching on during a chai break.

The business begins long before the customer arrives.

A special thank you to Akshara Jayaraj for helping document this excursion and conducting this interview in Kannada.

This sounds simple and straightforward enough. 

Now what if we try going from A to B in an Indian city at 8:47 in the morning? When the roads are full of school buses, delivery riders, office commuters, a very determined vegetable vendor with his cart, and a lovable brown puppy who has decided that the middle of the road is the best place to contemplate life. Suddenly A to B isn’t so simple. 

Let’s look at Gopalan, the local milkman. Disclaimer: this is a made up name. But the scenario is very much real.

Gopalan’s scooter carries big milk cans stacked in improbable ways that suggest a deep faith in gravity behaving itself. He does the same loop every day. Same roads. Same corners. Same chai stall that’s already open when the sun comes up. 

Same old routine. 

But if, one day his vehicle decides, halfway through the route, that today is the day it feels slightly different: slightly weaker, slightly slower, slightly unsure of itself, his whole morning starts to crumble. Why am I thinking about Gopalan and his commute, and his scooter balancing steel tins while defying the odds of physics?

This, as it turns out, is the sort of thing engineers think about. But I am not an engineer. Not even close. I am just penning down a rather interesting conversation I happened to have with my colleague-friend-River’s in-house-snack-enthusiast Mazher Ali Baig Mirza. Or simply, Mirza. Mirza is also River’s lead engineer and original mastermind behind this thought. On a particularly grey day at work, I decided to pick his brains about the topic.

And his thinking doesn’t start with the scooter.

It starts with the rider.

Think like a rider

“What does their day actually look like?” he asks as he munches on a ribbed masala chip at my desk. 

“Uhm whose day”? 

“The rider’s” he answers. I stare at him blankly. 

“What do you think they carry on a daily basis?” he probes again. “Aah” I exclaimed, mildly understanding what he meant. And so it begins. Our little brainstorm.

What does a rider carry on their scooter in India? Lets see:

A 19 year old might be carrying a cricket kit, a backpack that was theoretically meant for textbooks, and a friend on the back seat giving directions that are mostly wrong.

A 27 year old might be using the same scooter to get to work, pick up groceries, swing by the local cafe to meet her date, and make it home before dinner gets polished off by her flatmates. A 34 year old might be stacking it up with boxes of freshly prepared jams for a farmers’ market, a laundry bag full of creased clothes, a display blackboard and a foldable table. 

The point is, a scooter in India doesn’t just move people. It moves lives around.

Is the old cliche true?

There’s something engineers care about deeply but rarely explain in human language: consistency. Not speed, mind you.

Consistency. 

“Consistency is everything” says Mirza. Was he giving me advice? But I didn't disagree. I went on to ask him what it means when it’s about building a vehicle. 

He thought about it for a moment. This is a paraphrased version of his answer: 

On a standard electric scooter, performance quietly fades as the battery drains. The throttle response at 80% charge feels different from the one at 30%. Different again at 15%. The rider adapts, unconsciously, recalibrating their confidence with every dropping percentage point. Let’s go back to Gopalan again. He doesn't know what State of Charge or SOC means. (Neither did I). What he knows is that around the time he is passing through the final bit of his daily route, his scooter starts to feel slower and more reluctant. This is what engineers describe as performance degradation. What Mirza and his team were after was something different: a vehicle that feels exactly the same at the end of the battery as it did at the beginning. This required rethinking the engine and battery entirely. These needed to stop being two separate things and start being one system that maintains itself throughout the journey. Full power, full response, right until the last leg of the route. No fading. No hesitation. 

But consistency alone isn't the whole story either. India's roads are not the easiest to navigate. They offer slopes, surprise potholes, sudden braking, gravel patches, and sweet yet stubborn dogs who own the streets. A scooter loaded with canisters or groceries or a cricket kit or a carry-on suitcase needs to stay balanced when it hits a bump. It needs to be stable in its steering when fully loaded.

These are the things that quietly drain a rider. Not the big moments, but the thousand small corrections you make without thinking. By the time you reach B from point A, you're more tired than the distance even deserved. The goal, as Mirza put it, is a vehicle that reduces this tiredness. One that handles the road so the rider doesn't have to think about handling the road. Ha!

This is where Indie comes in. (Did you really think I wouldn't mention the Indie?)

Meet your space maker

Consider the idea of loading things onto the two-wheeler.

A scooter carrying real weight behaves differently from one carrying none. Any rider knows this in their body even if they couldn't explain it technically. The steering gets heavier. Or worse still, lighter in ways that feel unreliable and wonky.

River’s engineering answer to this is something called the Riverbed platform.

Here's the simplest way to think about it. Imagine a Jenga tower. The higher you build it, the more unstable it becomes. Technically fine, until something disturbs it. Now imagine taking those same blocks and arranging them into a wide, low structure. The weight is the same, but the centre of gravity is lower, making it stable by nature.

That's the Riverbed.

The weight rests at the bottom. The vehicle isn't fighting to stay upright when you load it. It simply stays put. The mechanics of balance. What it also means is this: on a conventional scooter, because the mechanical components are bulky and sit higher up inside the frame, the space available for carrying things is limited and awkward. The floorboard has a hump in the middle where the engine sits. Storage compartments are carved around whatever space is left over after the mechanics have taken their share. 

However, in the case of Indie, the mechanical bulkiness is no longer competing for the same space as your cargo. The floorbed becomes fully flat. The area where you'd stack things is now simply open. Which means more space. When Mirza talks about maximising storage, he doesn't mean adding just a bigger boot at the back. He means the entire structure of the vehicle has been arranged so that carrying things is not just an afterthought. Moreover, the vehicle doesn't dictate what it can carry. The rider decides. More capacity, more agency.

Predictability is cool. Predictability is hot.

Nobody wants to be called predictable at a party. But in the context of a vehicle that someone depends on for their livelihood? It is, in fact, the highest form of trust. And at the risk of this sounding like unsolicited dating advice, stable is the best choice. I should take my own advice.

In the two-wheeler world, here's how Mirza would explain predictability. If Gopalan's scooter tells him he has 43 km of range left, it needs to have 43 km left. Not approximately but accurately. Around those 43 km is what is holding the rest of his morning together.

Now imagine his scooter's range display is slightly off. It says 50 km, but it means 45 km. A 5 km variance doesn't sound like much. But it is the exact difference between Gopalan completing his deliveries and being stranded on the roadside with three full cans of milk, no customers, and a dead scooter. So, he stops trusting the number.

For anyone using a scooter for their livelihood, range isn't just a number on a screen it's how they plan their day.

In the beginning, when Mirza asked me to think about the rider, it was simply to reiterate that the thinking behind River Indie didn't start with the motor or the battery. It started with the rider, and what their day actually looks like. Indie was built to be capable, and consistent, and stable, and predictable. A vehicle that is just not a sum of its separate features, but a seamless feeling. The feeling that the vehicle is working with you. A feeling of blissful joy.

Try it on something ordinary. Like describing a tiger. Option 1. Long-whiskered wild cat; predator and lives in a dense forest. Option 2. Jungle cat; orange; black stripes; Sher Khan; will not cuddle.

Abstraction picks the second. It offers clarity. The first could have been a lioness, a panther or a rebellious housecat that has gone off to find its soulmate in the woods. Abstraction thinks in complexity and expresses in simplicity. Good design does the same. Good writing too. It edits. It chooses. It spares.

I am not a designer but I do watch from the sidelines. And from this vantage point, I have observed that the finest things travel far because they’re edited; not because they’re louder. In a world optimised for more, the brave choice is often less. 

Anyone can add. Addition is easy. And it may or may not be accompanied by sense. I can make a cat wear a hat and call it progressive thinking. Does it make sense to everyone? To most, probably not. Also, poor cat. 

Subtraction is innovation. Subtraction takes spine. The cleanest apps and objects feel confident because they originally left things out. Like a pencil. It writes and erases. Beautiful. A timeless classic that continues to perform its part. Any other ornament on a pencil is just that— an ornament. When you take it off, the pencil remains. 

And then there’s essence. What about essence? What about it? It’s the spirit of something that is hard to find and harder to keep. What if subtraction removes this very soul of a thing? Subtraction and essence get along just fine, I assure you.

How? You ask. Well, subtraction isn’t necessarily erasure. It simply gets rid of the fluff. Like a sieve. What is left is pure essence. And essence stays quiet. Think of it like an MTV Unplugged performance. If one removes the noise, a song truly reveals itself. I got that from Rick Rubin so it isn’t exactly original. But if you look at Clapton’s acoustic version of Layla, you can see how the song— stripped of other instruments, survives. It thrives even. Abstraction at its best. 

If abstraction is applied to most things, it might be possible to find unusual delight. And what is often brought to the surface along with essence, is purpose. The coolest things are those that you don’t notice until you need them. Like a sewing needle. You can walk around with a chic hole in your trousers and wait for it to grow. Or fish a needle and thread from a biscuit tin and be respectable in a few minutes. The point is, good design disappears. Abstraction sees that. Another idea stolen from Dieter Rams. Purpose is embedded in this tiny needle. It is blended in it so seamlessly that it hides until things go wrong. Then it appears quickly to fix the fabric and slips back into the tin, to be ignored again but never forgotten. Yet it dutifully serves its purpose. Abstraction in action.  So, if this were to be made into a formula, here’s what it might look like:

Subtraction × Abstraction = Essence + Purpose = Enough.

A mathematician might flinch while reading this but I hope it summarises this thread neatly. An abstract about abstraction. 

Look, abstraction costs. It takes work to be simple and clear. Like most things and processes, it begins with a jumble of squiggles and ends up with a tidy line. The chaos is a part of the journey. Perhaps it serves as a reminder to do the honest bit first and focus on what matters most. Perhaps less than is greater than. 

First, there’s Kavitha. She comes from a traditional farming family from rural Karnataka, where the economy of daily life left her dependent on everyone but herself. So one day, she left. Not dramatically, just a quiet decision to find a livelihood she could call her own.

Her first big idea? Donkey farming. On paper, viable. In practice, a complete disaster. But failure does strange, generous things if you’re paying attention. In the mess of that experiment, she noticed mushrooms. Low investment. Reliable demand. A gap in Bengaluru’s fresh supply. She tried again.

And this time, it worked. Slowly. Unevenly. With patience that only farming can teach

“In the beginning, it was incredibly difficult, especially as a woman from a rural background with financial limitations. But I’ve grown into it,” she says. “It takes about 41 days before you see anything. But when the mushrooms finally bloom, all the hard work is worth it.” She’s now in conversations with Zepto, hoping to shift from customers showing up at her doorstep to something more scalable.

Across the city in a completely different universe, an ex-marketer named Biplab Mahato was having his own quiet pivot. The 2020 lockdown pushed him toward holistic healing and mushrooms. Medicinal, mysterious and resilient, mushrooms became his gateway to a different life. What started as experiments in his mother’s kitchen garden in Jamshedpur turned into Shroomin, his small urban farm with a mission: grow great mushrooms and decode them.

He’s currently documenting a rare species found only in parts of Jharkhand.

“These mushrooms grow here,” he says. “Each species is a superfood with a story. Most of the foragers are women who really hold that knowledge. But this knowledge is at risk of disappearing. I want to archive it, share it, maybe even bring it into school classrooms. Imagine kids learning about ecology through something that actually grows in their backyard.”

Both Kavitha and Biplab are, in their own ways, running the same marathon at different speeds. Kavitha wants to scale; Biplab wants to go deeper. She thinks in markets, he thinks in ecosystems. But their stories bend toward a similar truth: nothing about this kind of work is linear. There are no glossy milestones. Just detours, pivots, experiments, and the occasional small miracle.

Their ambitions will shift. Their methods will evolve. But the instinct they share, the ability to move through uncertainty with curiosity, is what sustains them. Does success look less like climbing a mountain and more like growing a mushroom? I wonder. Because at some point, the mountain you climb will ask you to ascend. But a mushroom consistently asks you to pay attention.