BENGALURU: It was an ordinary Tuesday morning at Kamal and Company, a garlic shop on APMC’s 3rd Main Road, until it wasn’t. The shop usually opens at 8 am, but by 8:45-9:00, when Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar walked in unannounced, the day had already turned into one the shopkeepers won’t forget.
For the next ten minutes or so, the Chief Minister browsed like any curious customer, except he asked a lot of questions and wanted to check everything for himself.
The shop stocks eight to ten varieties of garlic, including the prized MP garlic in big and small sizes, bold grade and box packing. He picked up a 20-kg pack and lifted it to feel whether it truly weighed 20 kilos, then hefted a 30-kg carton to do the same. He also asked to inspect the garlic inside the box to check its quality.
Satisfied, he bought two kilos of fine garlic, priced at around Rs 240 a kilo, MP Garlic Bold, the market’s top variety, which typically sells for about Rs 350 in retail outside APMC.
Then came the moment that had everyone smiling: he stepped onto the shop’s weighing scale himself, first the manual one, then the electronic, to see if the two matched. Both read 97.6 kg.
“Accurate,” he reportedly murmured to himself, to the amusement of Deepak Shah, the shop’s owner.
When it came time to pay, the Chief Minister pulled out Rs 500 notes from his shirt pocket and insisted on paying. The shopkeepers, however, wouldn’t hear of it.
“We are honoured and deeply grateful that he came to our shop,” said Nitul Shah, Deepak’s brother. Deepak Shah’s son Jigar Shah has been so excited he cannot stop talking about it.
The shop’s two employees, Kumar and Swaminathan, both in their sixties, looked on as police accompanying the Chief Minister glanced around the premises.
The visit carried a quieter significance too: in a garlic shop nearby, two child labourers had been found working, and the police promptly booked them for employing child labour, making the ordinary, adult, family-run staffing at Kamal and Company notable by contrast.
Word of the visit spread fast. From 9:15 onward, a steady stream of visitors began arriving at the shop, each with more or less the same questions. Nitul Shah reckons he’s answered them close to 150 times since.
For context, garlic bags traditionally weighed 50 kg, but now commonly come in 20, 30 and 40-kg sizes. MP garlic remains among the priciest varieties in the market, though it’s the garlic from Ooty that holds the crown nationally, selling wholesale for Rs 350–400 per kg in Tamil Nadu and fetching Rs 400–450 in Bangalore.
Through it all, the weighing, the questions, the sudden crowd of onlookers, Deepak, Nitul and Jigar Shah couldn’t stop smiling, visibly touched by the unexpected attention their family’s shop had received.