Inside MITTI Café, run by people with disabilities and endorsed by Indian President

What do Roman emperor Nero, veteran journalist P. Sainath and social entrepreneur Alina Alam have in common? Little to nothing in reality, but they are connected in ways only stories can.

A BURNING QUESTION

In July 64 CE, Rome went up in flames. Nero is often accused of starting the fire and playing the fiddle as the city burned. Fiddlesticks! There is no evidence backing that claim, neither was the fiddle invented by then. An account of the burning of Rome can be found in historian Tacitus’s Annals.

“He [Nero] did not start the fire but he was very, very scared, and therefore he had to distract the masses,” Sainath tells a group of college students in the opening scene of Nero’s Guests (2009), Deepa Bhatia’s hard-hitting documentary on Sainath’s relentless and extensive coverage of the farmer suicides in Maharashtra. “Nero held the greatest party ever seen in the ancient world. In the beautiful prose of Tacitus, the emperor offered his gardens for the spectacle. Everybody who was anybody in Rome was at this party. They had a problem. The problem was one of lighting. In that huge garden, how did you create the illumination necessary for such a gigantic party? Nero solved that―he brought many criminals and prisoners and burnt them at stake…. For me, the issue was never Nero; the issue was Nero’s guests. Who were Nero’s guests? What sort of a mindset would it require for you to pop one more fig into your mouth as another human being burst into flames?”

That question came as a jolt to Alam. It was during the final semester of her master’s in development studies at the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, that she was shown this documentary. She was 22 then, waiting for placements to get a job and earn some money. But then Nero’s Guests happened. “At that point, I realised that I was one of Nero’s guests. That, if you feel something about anything and if you are not willing to take action, then you have taken a side. And unfortunately, that side is that of the oppressor,” recalls Alam, now 32.

She decided to forgo the placements and instead started volunteering at organisations that work in the disability inclusion space. She chose disability because she was brought up by her grandmother who had spinal cord issues and therefore had trouble walking. “All that I could see in her as a child were abilities,” says Alam. “But when I went out into the world, I just couldn’t connect with how a person’s disability and disability alone could define the opportunities that they got, in livelihood, in life, in love, in friendships.”

That is when Alam realised that the problem was not the billion plus people with disabilities across the world, including the 70 million in India, rather “the problem was a larger statistic, which is the disability in our perceptions that stops us from seeing the magic in their abilities”. She wanted to change just that. “I needed a common denominator that could connect people to people, and what better than food to do so,” says Alam. Thus was born the idea for MITTI Café.

MUD & MORALS

“Mitti means mud,” explains Alam, “and irrespective of our differences in terms of religion, race, ideologies, geography, gender, we all come from mitti and to mitti we will eventually return.”

With MITTI Café, Alam had two goals: one, generate sustainable livelihood opportunities for the differently abled, and second, create awareness about inclusion with every meal or beverage they serve. But she had zero startup capital and little knowledge of starting a business, that too a social enterprise. Growing up in Kolkata, she says, they didn’t have a lot of money in the family. “There were festivals when we didn’t have glittering attires, but we were still very happy as a family,” recalls Alam. “As children, we learned very early on that money cannot be the only factor to make you happy. There are things much more important than that. Despite having limited means, I have always seen my parents engaging in activities to help those who are in a more difficult situation than us.”

She remembers her father, Sarfaraz Alam, who had a corporate job, being pro-labour and wanting to shut down a factory because it was about to replace workers with new equipment from abroad. Sarfaraz, visibly self-conscious at the praise from his daughter, recalls starting a night school for children from the basti near their home. So when little Alam had to choose between buying puchkas with the pocket money she had saved or giving it to the man, covered in flies, lying on the road while on her way home from school, she did not hesitate to do the latter. Not that the act made her any happy, confesses Alam. She was a child, after all. But when she told her parents about what she had done, “the reinforcement that I got then, I think, whatever I am doing now is a scaled version of that emotion that I seek”, says the middle child (she has an elder sister and a younger brother).

With unwavering support from her family and a firm belief in her values and dream, Alam set out to start a café that would employ only people with disabilities, be it physical, intellectual or psychiatric. But first, there were rejections―lots of them―and learning.

“I did not even know what capex (capital expenditure) and opex (operating expense) were,” says Alam, who finally got her initial mentoring at IIM Bangalore’s incubation cell NSRCEL. The cell also helped her connect with the Deshpande Foundation in Hubbali, north Karnataka, that provided her with the space to set up her first café. Only that space was a dilapidated, rat-infested tin shed. That is when Alam experienced the compassion and courage that exists inherently in communities. She cleaned the shed with the help of the student community and, because funds were not easy to come by, went door-to-door asking for supplies and got them, from secondhand spoons and tables to oven and fridge. With that, MITTI Café opened its doors in 2016.

WORK-LOVE BALANCE

Among the first few to walk in to the café was Kirti Kale. Only she didn’t walk in; she crawled in. Kale, a paraplegic, had no wheelchair then; her family couldn’t afford one. She went on to lead the team at the Hubbali café, and today the 29-year-old is manager at another café.

MITTI Café, which now has 56 outlets across the country thanks to funding from corporate social responsibility initiatives, has given not just employment to people like Kale (more than 600 of them), but also confidence in their abilities. Take, for instance, Sabiha Sheikh, 37, who has multiple sclerosis. Alam knew she couldn’t work in the kitchen because she had no control over her hands or legs, but realised she had the gift of the gab―if you came in for a Rs10 chai, she would talk you into ordering a combo meal worth Rs50 (the menu at MITTI is simple: tea, coffee and everything around that). Sheikh is no longer with MITTI Café; she has outgrown it. “She started her own kirana (grocery) shop. She deployed a person with Down syndrome, and she is one of our mentors [at MITTI’s experiential training module]. Our atta-chawal (wheat flour-rice) comes from her shop,” says Alam, adding that they have trained 10 times the number of people they have employed.

There are people who have found love at work, too. Like Bhairappa Biradur, who has dwarfism with motor and mild intellectual disabilities. Before he joined MITTI, he had no friends. His mother had died giving him birth, and nobody in his village would let their children play with him. He had been rejected at more than 80 jobs. “He was also told that because of his disability, nobody will ever love him,” says Alam. But at MITTI, he found work, friends and love. He met Roopa, who works at the MITTI Café in Wipro. They are now married, and Biradur, 35, leads the team at the café at the Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru. MITTI Café has played Cupid to 30-plus couples, says Alam.

A VIP GUEST LIST

The Bengaluru airport took MITTI Café to some very interesting places. How it landed there in the first place is quite providential. The pandemic-induced lockdown was in place. That meant shutters down for MITTI Café outlets, as most of them were in and around corporate offices. But MITTI continued to raise money to send it to the accounts of its team members. “But they didn’t want money sitting at home; they wanted to come back and earn with dignity,” says Alam. “So, we started Karuna Meals, where if somebody cannot go to MITTI Café, the café goes to them. More than 60 lakh meals were cooked, packed and distributed along with lakhs of ration kits by our team members with disabilities for people from economically vulnerable communities, thereby changing the paradigm that persons with disabilities cannot support themselves; they can support the nation in need.” MITTI also started a gifting vertical to support its team members. And because hospitals were the only institutions up and running at full steam then, it opened cafes there as well. It was at one such café that Hari Marar, MD and CEO of the Bangalore International Airport Limited, stopped by while he was at the hospital for his Covid jab. And, MITTI Café found a spot at the airport in 2022, followed by the one at Mumbai airport in 2024.

In 2023, Alam got a call from Priya Hingorani, senior advocate at the Supreme Court, asking why MITTI Café didn’t have an outlet at India’s apex court. “She wrote to Justice D.Y. Chandrachud (then chief justice of India). And he, being him, and even his wife, Kalpana [Das] ma’am―she inaugurated our café at Hansraj college―and both of them have adopted two lovely daughters, Priyanka and Mahi, who have disabilities... whatever he did, he did from his heart.” says Alam. “He inaugurated our café (in November), thereby enabling us to send across a message to the entire country about the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion.”

A few days later, on Constitution Day, Justice Chandrachud brought President Droupadi Murmu to the café. And in June 2024, Rashtrapati Bhavan had its own MITTI Café. The inauguration happened to be on Murmu’s birthday, and the MITTI team baked a cake for her. “We didn’t expect her to cut the cake because of security reasons,” recalls Alam. “She is so warm and loving―she not only cut the cake but also fed a piece to each of the team members.” On December 3, MITTI Café was one of 11 institutions to be awarded the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities.

KINDNESS ≠ EQUAL TREATMENT

The leadership of the country, be it the president or the former CJI, are inclusive and compassionate and do not shy away from showing it, says Alam. While that helps send a strong message across the country, Alam says a lot more needs to be done. “All of us have a set of disabilities,” she says. “Even now, when I look at Excel sheets, it feels like I am looking at ants crawling. I am not good at it; somebody else is. I am good at matters of the heart. Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, and that is something one must acknowledge and that’s the sensitisation one must enable at scale.” And while policies are being made, Alam says they can bring results when the community is involved, and that can happen only if it is a bottom-up, participatory approach.

That is crucial because not every act of kindness translates to equal treatment; it is that thin line separating equality from equity. We start segregating people from a young age―we have special schools for children with disabilities―and many of us walk through life barely interacting with a person with disabilities. And, that shows.

So, Prof Rishikesha T. Krishnan, director of IIM Bangalore, which got its MITTI Café in late 2024, believes that an integrative approach, right from schooling, can be a game-changer. “Today, we have a lot of technological support, which makes it much easier for students with disabilities to integrate. For instance, in IIM, for students with visual disabilities, we provide them with course material in machine-readable form, and they can just put it on their computer and they will have it all in the audio format,” he says. “The school system should also be equally adaptable, so that we can have integration from an early stage. That will help us recognise each other’s strengths and we will be able to work together in a more constructive way.”

WOMAN, MOTHER, MINORITY

When Alam first started approaching people for MITTI Café’s incubation, she was often asked what any woman with a dream is asked: what about after marriage and kids? In Alam’s case, she had to battle not just gender stereotypes but also the society’s conventional outlook towards a woman from a minority community.

Alam didn’t have an answer for them then, but she does now. She married Mohd Sadique Akhter, a market research entrepreneur, in 2022. They met on Muzmatch, a dating app for Muslims. “My parents were finding it difficult to find a match for me because most people would feel intimidated by what I was doing and the amount of travelling that I did for work,” says Alam. “I am sure I scared quite a few of them. So I took it upon myself to find someone.”

Akhter messaged her first on Muzmatch. He had seen a newspaper article on her and gushed to a colleague about the work she was doing. Three months of chatting with her, and he was in love. He wanted to marry her; his parents didn’t even want to meet her. They were worried if she would have time for him and family. Nine months into dating Akhter, Alam decided to call it quits as both their parents were against their match. But Akhter persisted. They told their parents that they would get married on December 25, with or without their consent. Alam’s parents gave in, Akhter’s didn’t. So Akhter “ran away” and got married to Alam. It took over a year for Akhter’s parents to accept their marriage, and now Alam even travels with her mother-in-law at times for work.

“My decisions have not been impacted after I got married, because I have a partner who is understanding,” says Alam, who is now based in Mumbai. “I did become a mother, and there is a second one coming. Being a mother has made me so much stronger as an entrepreneur, and we have been able to scale so much more after Orhan was born.” She was back at work a week after having Orhan, and takes him along everywhere she goes, with a family member or a nanny in tow. But she is not one to tell other women to follow suit―those were her choices and she is aware that not every woman has the agency that she has.

And, Alam says she knows how her choices are viewed through the lens of her community because of the misconceptions surrounding it. “A lot of people do not see a woman entrepreneur doing what she is doing, not just outside, but even people within―my close relatives are just not able to connect with what I do,” she says. “But me having the faith that I do―I am a practising Muslim―it has taught me the fundamentals of peace, compassion and courage. Every religion would only teach you love, and would only glorify compassion and courage and standing up for what is right. And that’s the strength that I draw from my faith as well.”

With Bhanu Prakash Chandra