(Part-3) Conveniences | Life In India After Returning From US
Posts In This Series -
Part-1 | Prologue
Part-2 | Family
Part-3 | Conveniences
Part-4 | Public Infrastructure
With our country's explosive population, there arises the associated tragedy of shortage of jobs with decent pay. As a consequence, you have the availability of a labor force willing to do all your dirty, grunt work - what we rich, privileged folks like to call one of the 'conveniences' of living in India.
It's easy for me to type out words and pretend to be self-righteous. Let me however admit that I'm a hypocrite and I continue to enjoy these 'conveniences', although with some guilt. Just like I'm a hypocrite for having watched enough videos on animal cruelty by the meat industry, and yet I can’t give up eating meat.
With that note of self-loathing aside, let's look at the conveniences I'm enjoying in India!
Really, if you are upper middle-class and above, and live in a metro in India, you never have to lift a finger to get your chores done. And if you aren’t careful, it won’t also be long before you invite obesity and heart conditions into your sedentary lifestyle.
Deliveries And @Home Services..
Nearly every product and service is now delivered to your doorstep.
Our parents had their dairy and newspapers delivered home. And then as my generation was coming of age, we saw the rise of e-commerce - still mostly limited to non-consumable, non-perishable products.
Now, the next wave unfolding is the app-driven delivery of perishable/consumable products and essential services to our doorstep.
You can get your groceries, raw-meat, restaurant-food, and every other imaginable product delivered home. Another perk rarely seen in western countries is that the products you want to return back gets picked back up at your doorstep for free.
You can arrange for urgently-needed essentials, share your home-cooked food and personal items with your local family and friends using services like Dunzo.
Car washes, haircuts and beauty parlor services are now offered at-home. Any large appliance or furniture that gets delivered to your home also comes with a service technician that assembles the thing and gives you a demo if necessary.
There are grocery delivery apps like Zepto whose business proposition is that they deliver grocery to your home within 10 minutes of placing an order.
To get a sense of the ridiculous levels of pampering we have available - We even recently got our blood samples collected from home for our blood work.
And then there's the lifeline of Indian households - Domestic Help!
Probably one of the largest pool of workers are in the unorganized/unregulated domestic work sector in India, and they will make sure that you never again have to deal with household chores again.
We employ a maid that does the sweeping, mopping and dishes. A cook-fairy magically appears everyday, prepares our three meals with a swipe of her wand, and magically vanishes. We have a part time driver available on-call for longer driving assignments.
Nannies could take care of your kids at your home for the major part of the day, but don’t expect any legal paperwork procedures before handing over your kids for them to care.
Living in an apartment community comes with amenities such as the on-premises plumber, electrician and various other handymen being a call away. You place the garbage just outside your door and it gets picked up daily.
We’re a society that’s very unfamiliar with the DIY culture, because we all possess a deadly skill - How To Make A Phone Call!
Me Asks - “The bathroom tap is leaking. Do you know where the wrench is?”
She Says - “Just make a phone call to the plumber, silly!”
Me Asks - “Hey isn’t that door making an annoying creaky sound? Where’s the oil, let me lubricate the hinges.”
She Says - “Uh, just call the plumber, OK?”
Me Asks - “Did you mean carpenter?”
She Says - “Yeah, whatever. Just call!”
Let’s take a moment to recognize that CubicleDog is a kind hearted Pug. He doesn’t bite.
The fact that domestic workers are one of the most abused, overworked people is something I try not to forget. We make our best effort to shun the master-slave mindset and treat our domestic help with kindness and respect. We pay her well, always on time and sometimes in advance if she so needs, and keep giving away a ton of stuff that we don’t need.
We give Sundays off to our honest, hard-working maid.
Having never experienced what a ‘weekend’ means, our maid was delighted when I offered her Sundays off. She said this was the first time someone had given her a scheduled day off every week.
Our apartment community has an app where you can write reviews on your domestic helpers. When I encouraged our maid to also request for getting Sunday off at other houses she works at, it wasn’t long before some narrow-minded uncle threw in a negative review.
I just had to respond to that. Here’s a screenshot.
You can be big-hearted while still being smart enough to ensure your domestic helpers don’t take advantage of your kindness.
Here’s a related article on this topic - Link.
The Rise of Fintech..
Let’s move on to something else that doesn’t involve one class of the society enjoying the laborings of another class - Fintech.
Fintech has exploded in India, and is an example of democratization in it’s truest form - in that, it’s not just serving the privileged.
Street vendors operating at the lowest levels have now turned digital. I barely carry any cash or cards with me anymore when I'm out and about. All I need is a smartphone with apps like PayTM linked to my bank account.
Finances in urban India are now practically functioning over smartphone apps - at least as long as you're talking white-money economy.
Many other financial services like banking and brokerages have turned fully digital, so we've gotten to the point where the tech savvy amongst us squirm at the idea of having to visit a branch.
Any new financial relationship could be initiated from your home, such as opening bank accounts, brokerage accounts, fixed deposits, etc. Some of these banks are willing to send an agent to your home to help with paperwork.
Even some of the much dreaded governmental tasks can now be done online. I got my voter ID card done entirely online, without ever stepping out of the house! Voter ID card however could be a special case. They want you to vote, so they probably make it easy.
I'll be truly impressed when I can renew my driver's license, or register property online without having to run around and bribe a bunch of lowlives.
Taking A Few Steps Back..
Let’s not get too carried away by the sickening onslaught of conveniences.
Let’s pop in a red pill.
While it's easy to get all starry eyed and optimistic, believing India is now rapidly zipping along the path toward progress and prosperity, it's worth noting the superficiality of it all.
You might want to ponder for a moment if this is all a coating of chocolate over a strawberry that's rotten on the inside.
Most of the conveniences listed above are confined to the big cities, and only to the educated middle-class and above. The tech-unempowered millions are still burning their time queueing up at banks and post offices, looking for an “educated-looking” person to help them fill out confusing paper forms.
If you descend down the socio-economic ladder, you’ll see things regressing back to the older way of life. You move out of the bigger cities and all these modern amenities drop off the map.
Much remains to be addressed in areas that are real indicators of a truly developing nation - infrastructure, employment, healthcare, effective law-enforcement, etc. And we all well know how the country fares in these categories.
The app-universe is a world run by entrepreneurs leveraging the availability of a large pool of gig workers. I have a lot of respect for these resourceful entrepreneurs that are changing the face of India, but yet, their foot-soldiers are these gig workers that barely make a decent living and as far as I know, are offered no insurance or benefits.
If a poor delivery guy falls into a carelessly dug-up hole in the road while he's rushing to meet your 10-minute grocery delivery deadline, good luck to him. He's now on his own, and the ‘disruptive’ startup will have nothing to do with him.
The more these conveniences become available to me, the more I perversely feel like I'm playing a small role in the exploitation of the dirt-cheap labor force, just because I'm too rich, lazy or busy to run my own errands.
While I continue to enjoy these amenities with a hint of guilt, I address my guilt with a few passive cover-ups:
I don't use 10 minute delivery services. I really don't want some poor chap driving recklessly on these roads just because I'm too precious a snowflake that'll melt away if I don't get my gourmet almond milk in the next ten minutes.
I tip service people as reasonably as I can.
I treat them with dignity, and don't turn into an entitled jerk if they're running late or make minor mistakes.
I take the time to leave a good rating to the service person, if I feel they offered good service.
I honor the work-life boundaries of our apartment maintenance crew by not calling them during weekday-evenings and not bothering them on weekends.
As a tiny measure of respect, I address even younger looking working-class laborers with honorifics. (Neevu instead of Neenu in Kannada, Aap rather than Tum in Hindi.)
As I mentioned earlier, I give Sundays off to our domestic help and our cook.
That’s all I’ve got for this part in the “Life In India” series!
In my next post, I’ll try to throw in some comments on big systemic issues in India - Infrastructure, traffic, pollution, etc.
Talk soon,
- Dog
Been following this series, you sum up my moral conundrum with these 'conveniences' very well. Thank you for treating your cook and maid with dignity, I hope giving them Sundays off becomes more widespread. Waiting for the next in the series, to answer my question of if one wants to avoid the delivery apps and do some of the things themselves, how hard is it to get around.
Thanks for your post :)
You are a good person and want to do the right thing. And a little bit of guilt is useful in that. But feeling guilty can also be counterproductive.
It’s good to remember that these upper class conveniences also provide a livelihood to many and the alternative sometimes is often scary for them.
The dignity and salaries of some of these jobs (cooks, for example) have gone up quite a bit in the last 2 decades. Very often, while working/commuting/kids they are a necessity and people are more mindful nowadays. A long way to go though, I agree.