a sweet with a passport

putharekulu is a sweet from atreyapuram, in my part of andhra. you pour milk onto a hot inverted pot, wait, and lift off a sheet thin enough to read through. sugar or jaggery goes in the middle, the sheet gets folded, and that is the whole thing. the families who make it have been making it the same way for a very long time.

a geographical indication answers a specific problem: anyone can print the name of your town on a box. a gi tag ties the name to the place and the method, so the label stops being decoration and becomes a claim somebody can actually enforce.

filing it meant sitting on both sides of a table. on one side, artisan families who hold the process in their hands and have no particular interest in a form. on the other, a registry that only accepts the form. most of the work was translation, and most of the translation was listening long enough to write down what they already knew.

it is the least technical thing i have worked on and probably the one i would defend hardest. software i can rewrite next week. this one is a name that now belongs to the people who earned it.