When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(46)

Competitive rowing is one of the only racing sports where the athletes have their backs to the finish line. Only one teammate faces forward. And on George Washington University’s NCAA Division I women’s team, that person was Lydia Barber, the coxswain. In practices and competitions, Barber, who graduated in 2017, sat in the stern of the boat, a headset microphone strapped to her head, shouting instructions at eight rowers. Traditionally, coxswains are as small and light as possible so the boat has less weight to carry. Barber is just four feet tall (she has dwarfism). But her temperament and skills are such a ferocious combination of focus and leadership that, in many ways, she carries the boat.

Barber was the pacesetter, and therefore the boss, for a team of rowers whose 2,000-meter competitions typically last seven minutes. During those 400 to 500 seconds, she called out the rhythm of the strokes, which meant “you must be willing to be in charge and have a big personality,” she told me. A race typically begins with the boat sitting in the water, so the rowers must make five quick short strokes just to get moving. Barber next would call out fifteen “high strokes”—at a pace of about forty strokes per minute. Then she’d execute a shift to a slightly slower stroke rhythm, warning her rowers “Shifting one . . . shifting two . . . shifffffft!”

For the rest of the race, her job was to steer the shell, execute the race strategy, and, most important, keep the team motivated and synchronized. In a competition against Duquesne University, this is part of what her call sounded like:

We’re RAAAAACCCCIIIING this!

It’s BEAUtiful.

Put the blade innnnn . . . and GO!

(beat)

That’s one.

(beat)

Two . . .

Load it up!

Three . . .

TAKE that gap!

Four . . .

TAKE that gap!

Five . . .

Run away with it.

Six . . .

Go!

Seven . . .

GO!

Eight . . .

Big LEGGGGS!

Nine . . .

Hell yeah!

Ten . . .

Sit up! Blades in!

Fuck yeah, G-Dubs! Get the legs in and GO!



The boat can’t move at its fastest pace without the eight rowers exquisitely synchronized with one another. But they can’t synch effectively without Barber. Their speed depends on someone who never touches an oar, just as the Congressional Chorus’s sound hinges on Simmons, who never sings a note. For group timing, the boss is above, apart, and essential.

In the case of the dabbawalas, however, the boss—their zeitgeber—doesn’t settle in front of a music stand or crouch in the stern of a boat. It hovers above their heads in the train station and in their minds throughout the day.

Most of Ahilu Adhav’s morning pickups are quick and efficient—an arm extended from inside an apartment thrusting a bag into Adhav’s waiting hands. He doesn’t phone ahead of time. Customers don’t track him as if he were an Uber or a Lyft car. By the end of his route, he has fifteen bags dangling from his bicycle. He pedals to a patch of pavement across from the Vile Parle train station, where he’s soon joined by about ten other walas. They unfasten the lunches, pile them on the ground, and start sorting the bags with the speed and self-assurance of a three-card monte dealer. Each wala then assembles ten to twenty lunches, ties them together, and slings the bundle over his back. Then they march toward the train station to the platform of the Western line of the Mumbai rail system.

Dabbawalas have considerable autonomy in their jobs. Nobody tells them in what order they must collect or deliver the lunches. They determine the division of labor among the team without anyone acting as a heavy-handed foreman.

But in one dimension, they have no leeway at all: time. Indian business culture typically schedules lunch between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. That means the dabbawalas must make all their deliveries by 12:45 p.m. And that means Adhav’s team must board the 10:51 a.m. train from the Vile Parle station. Miss that train and the entire schedule crumbles. For the walas, the railway schedule is the boss—the external standard that sets the rhythm, pace, and tempo of their work, the force that imposes discipline on what could otherwise be chaos. It is the unassailable despot, the czarist zeitgeber whose authority is unquestioned and whose rulings are final—an inanimate coxswain or chorus master.

So on this Monday, as on all days, the dabbawalas arrive on the platform with several minutes to spare. As the overhead clock approaches 10:45, they all gather their bags, and before the train has even fully stopped, they clamber into its luggage compartment to ride into South Mumbai.


THE BENEFITS OF BELONGING: SYNCHING TO THE TRIBE

H ere’s something you should know about Mumbai’s dabbawalas: Most of them have, at best, an eighth grade education. Many of them cannot read or write, a fact that only deepens the implausibility of what they do.

Suppose you’re a venture capitalist and I pitch you the following business idea:

It’s a lunch-delivery service. Homemade meals picked up at people’s apartments and delivered precisely at lunchtime to the desk of their family member on the other side of town. That town, by the way, is the world’s tenth largest city, with twice the population of New York City but lacking much of its basic infrastructure. Our venture will not use mobile phones, text messages, online maps, or pretty much any other communications technology. And to staff the operation, we will hire people who have not graduated from secondary school, many of whom are functionally illiterate.