Free-for-all is a term generally used to describe chaos. And chaos is a word one could use to describe much of Delhi. But at the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib kitchen, a Sikh temple which serves meals to around 10,000 people every single day, there’s not a trace of chaos. And the food is free. For all.

The Gurwara Bangla Sahib langara has been feeding Delhi residents since 1935. Day in and day out a factory of human hands churns out what one member of our group observed as a day’s peace of mind for hungry members of the community. “If you get your day’s meal,” he said, “you can relax. You can survive.” It’s not a matter of survival for everyone who eats there — in fact, most people with whom we shared lunch looked happy and healthy, and had probably come as members of the spiritual community. But it’s there for anyone who needs it, and in a city of 13 million (and rapidly growing), an open, organized, clean, reliable, and free food source couldn’t be more valuable.

Every Sikh temple throughout the world has a Langar (Punjabi for “free kitchen”). This is not a soup kitchen. It’s not exclusively for the poor, nor exclusively for the Sikh community. Volunteering in the cooking, serving and cleaning process is a form of active spiritual practice for devotees, but the service they provide asks no religious affiliation of its recipients. Our guide’s chorus was, “Man, woman, color, caste, community,” meaning you will be fed here regardless of how you fit into any of those classifications. This spirit of inclusion and equality is reinforced by the kitchen’s adherence to vegetarianism, not because Sikhs are vegetarian, but because others who visit may be, and by serving no meat, they exclude nobody.

The preparations take place in an open air building with stone floors which has been arranged with several preparation stations. In one area, men and women sit together around a huge rectangular platform covered in dough. They roll balls, flatten them into circles, and pile them up to pass over to the griddle built into the floor, where only men sit around with long flippers, turning the white slabs of dough over and over until they acquire dark brown speckles, at which point they flick them off the heat and onto a cloth.

To stir the vegetables in the wok they use a shovel — the kind you’d used to dig a hole or shovel snow; the ladle for the lentil pot probably has a one-quart capacity; and the wash basins look more like bathing tubs at an ancient bathhouse than dish sinks, with high cement walls around a long, shallow pool. A row of volunteers sits on the ground near the washing area cleaning off metal plates by hand and passing them to the basins for rinsing. Stacked plates pile up along one side, ready for the next seating of eaters.