4 minutes reading time
Jan 15, 2015 – Coimbatore.
I started writing this a few days ago under the shadow of the Karnataka Milk Federation building at Dairy Circle. Didn't get far. The Coimbatore bus pulled up and I had to scramble. I managed exactly one line in my notebook, scribbled between the dust and the engine noise: “Not just Milma. Nandini is doing well too. So why not our Aavin?”
That afternoon at Dairy Circle, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. I had enough cash for the bus ticket home for Pongal and maybe ten rupees spare. My degree is a piece of paper I haven’t even finished earning yet. I am an Idayan. Cow-herders by blood. And I’m standing there, jobless, unable to afford a full liter of milk.
I bought a packet of Nandini buttermilk instead. Five rupees. Cold. Salty. Mostly water. But very refreshing and cheap. It was lunch and dinner combined. I drank it leaning against the KMF gate, watching their refrigerated trucks roll out like an invading army. On the compound walls, massive hoardings of Puneeth Rajkumar smiled down at me with a glass of milk. In Bangalore, the movie stars tell you to drink milk. In Tamil Nadu, the stars tell you which political party to fear.
Now I’m home. Pongal. The "festival of farmers." A celebration that means absolutely nothing to me. A cultural performance we are forced to put on.
We have two cows. Family members we can’t afford to feed properly. My mother wakes up at 4:00 AM, gets the cow ready, milks it, and hands it over to the milkman. We don't take the milk to the Aavin collection point ourselves; it’s too far. Too much labor for just a few liters. So we sell it to a guy, who sells it to a guy, who eventually dumps it on the state. By the time it reaches an orange sachet, the cooperative has sucked the cream out of the milk and the money out of the farmer.
I remember the ads from when I was a kid. Arokya milk. "Amma gives him 4.5 milk." Hatsun and the private players burned millions to make us think their milk was superior. They won. In Tamil Nadu, Aavin is the absolute last choice. It’s treated like ration rice—you buy it only because you have to, because the local shop ran out of Arokya or Cavin’s.
In Bangalore, Nandini is a household god. A point of pride. It’s the "Anand model" actually working in the south. Amul did it in Gujarat, KMF does it here. They pay the farmer, they keep the price low, they own the market.
Why aren't we fixing Aavin?
Because the government treats it like a vote bank, not a business. They slash the retail price to win elections, but they don't pay the farmer enough to survive the feed costs. Every liter my mother sells is a slow bleeding loss.
Meanwhile, the state’s real obsession is TASMAC. Liquor brings in the hard cash. Cash that fuels the populist freebies that keep the milk price artificially low. It’s a closed loop of misery. The state would rather see a village drunk on cheap liquor than healthy on the milk our ancestors herded.
What’s the fix? Pay the farmer what it actually costs to keep a cow alive. Let the farmers run the cooperative, not party thugs and failed politicians. Get Rajini or Kamal to do ads for free. "Drink Aavin, save the Tamil farmer." If people here treat an actor like a deity, maybe they can treat a glass of milk like a necessity.
But I’m dreaming. They say Puneeth Rajkumar did the Nandini ads pro-bono. A legacy of his father. In Tamil Nadu, we don't do "free" unless it's a pre-election handout. The thought of an A-list star standing in a cow shed to save a cooperative is a joke that wouldn't survive a script reading in Poes Garden. The state is hooked on the liquid gold in the green bottles. Why push white milk when the brown stuff pays for the free mixies?
Aavin isn't a brand. It’s a tragedy in an orange packet. I finished that five-rupee buttermilk at Dairy Circle and realized that being an Idayan in 2015 just means you’re a ghost in the machinery of a state that would rather see you drunk than fed.