Vaisnav Kirana & General Store

You can find us at Ram Lila Chowk in Kota. This area gets really busy during festival times, but most days it’s just the usual flow of people going about their business. We’ve been running Vaisnav Kirana & General Store for a while now. The shop is filled with everything from lentils to toothpaste. We try to pack the shelves as much as possible so we don’t have to keep going to the back room for more stock. It’s a bit of a maze inside. We have an old fan that makes a clicking sound, but it keeps us cool enough when the Kota sun is beating down on the street. We get all kinds of customers, from students living in hostels nearby to grandmothers looking for the right kind of mustard seeds. We don’t use any fancy marketing tricks. People come here because we’re right on the corner and we usually have what they need. Sometimes we run out of change, so we have to ask people to go to the next stall or wait while we run across the street to break a big note. It’s a friendly enough place. We keep a small stool outside for anyone who needs to sit for a minute. The walls could probably use a fresh coat of paint, but we’re too busy selling stuff to worry about that right now. It's just a regular, honest shop.