It has been more than a decade since companies started testing food delivery by drone, and yet I am still waiting for my first drone-delivered bucket of biryani. If you’re wondering why I used the word “bucket,” it’s because a restaurant near my home, Hyderabad House, sells biryani by the bucket. It doesn’t come in an actual bucket, but the quantity is enough to fill a bucket—or my stomach for a week. If you have never had Hyderabad House’s biryani, you really need to put it on your bucket list.
Hyderabad House is about a mile from my house, and I’ve often driven there to pick up biryani. But it would be really great if a drone could bring a bucket to my house. Unfortunately, the proprietors of the restaurant do not offer drone delivery, nor have they taken me up on my offer to start a GoFundMe campaign to buy them a drone.
Back in November 2016, a New Zealand couple became the first recipients of a drone-delivered pizza. Domino’s Pizza flew two pizzas (one topped with peri-peri chicken and the other chicken and cranberry) to the backyard of Emma and Johnny Norman in Whangaparaoa, just north of Auckland. Speaking of the advantages of drone delivery, Domino’s Group CEO Don Meij said, “They can avoid traffic congestion and traffic lights, and safely reduce the delivery time and distance by travelling directly to customers’ homes. This is the future.”
Well, almost a decade has passed and I’m still waiting for the “future.” It doesn’t seem fair to me that I should still be waiting for food delivery by drone when some prisoners are already enjoying this service. As the Associated Press reported, three weeks before Christmas, guards at a prison in Bishopville, South Carolina, found a drone-dropped package of food—raw steak, crab legs, and Old Bay seasoning—marijuana, and cigarettes in the prison yard. (A prison yard is a fenced-in area where prisoners can spend a little time outdoors, getting exercise, fresh air, and the occasional drone delivery.) “I’m guessing the inmates who were expecting the package are crabby,” said prison spokeswoman Chrysti Shain, launching her stand-up comedy career. (Stay tuned for her Netflix special “Crabby Prisoners Have an Itch to Scratch.”)
According to the report, prison authorities also seized the drone that made the delivery, but have yet to seize the drone’s owner. I don’t think this is an isolated incident. I came to this conclusion after seeing a picture of prisoners in South Carolina and noting that several of them were smiling. These prisoners are clearly getting food deliveries by drone. What’s even more concerning is that they’re getting deliveries of raw food. They evidently have a secret kitchen where they cook steak and crab legs while smoking marijuana and cigarettes and joking about rejecting a pardon from Donald Trump. If criminals can find a way to get crab legs by drone, why is it so hard for me to get biryani by drone?
Apparently, food companies have been unable to overcome the legal, technical, and safety challenges of getting a drone to deliver food to an individual home. And yet drones are being used in many other ways, including warfare. A military drone can drop a bomb with great precision on my house, but somehow no one is able to drop a bucket of biryani. (If only we spent as much money on feeding people as we do on bombing people.) Drones are also being used to deliver medicine in many parts of the world. In India, a World Economic Forum initiative has made thousands of deliveries of medicine by drone to remote and mountainous regions. This important initiative, called “Medicine from the Sky,” has helped keep many people healthy.
I’m still waiting, however, for the important initiative called “Biryani from the Sky.”
Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge. [Comments? Contributions? Please email us at melvin@melvindurai.com. We welcome jokes, quotes, online clips, and more.]