At your service

A true measure of a person is how they treat their domestic staff 

The papers have recently been full of reports about a prominent Indian-origin family settled abroad, whose treatment of their household staff has led them to being handed prison sentences. Their crimes include grossly underpaying their staff, making them work all hours, confiscating their passports, and so on.

 

Reading these reports, I must confess that while I was shocked, I was not surprised. This particular family may have caught the attention of the law, but what they did is all too common among Indian households, both within this country and abroad. As a people, we tend to treat our household staff like our personal slaves, with no personal lives of their own. We make them work night and day, they are forever on call depending on our whims and fancies, and we grudge them even an annual pay rise no matter how hard they work. If they happen to live with us, they spend their nights on the floor in dingy, airless rooms, with scarcely any ventilation. And if they live on their own, the salaries we pay them don’t enable them to rent even a two-room set on their own.

 

I know what you’re muttering to yourself as you read this: this is a gross generalization; not every Indian family behaves like this; my servants are paid handsomely and treated like family; and so on. And perhaps you are right. But my essential point remains: even if there are some exceptions among us, the general standard of behaviour towards household staff remains abysmal in India. And if the law were to be applied equally, there would be many other Indian families who would also be headed to jail.

 

But, as we all know, that will never happen in India. It is this sense of security that enables so many of us to treat our staff with casual cruelty or simply throwaway thoughtlessness. And since we get away with it, we see no incentive in changing our behaviour and granting them a living wage, basic dignity and self-respect.

 

One easy way of gauging if we are treating our household staff with compassion and empathy is to ask ourselves how we would react if our bosses at work treated us in the same way. Would we be happy working a 16 to 18-hour day and then getting up the next day to do it all over again, seven days of the week, without any respite in sight? How would we react if we took a day off and had our pay cut as a consequence? What would our reaction be if we weren’t paid for our annual leave? How incentivized would we be to work if we didn’t get a raise for years on end?

 

My guess is that if we had to work like this, it wouldn’t be long before we began looking for another job that put a fair price on our work and treated us as valued employees. And yet, too many of us expect our household staff to just suck it up and be grateful to have a roof over their head, a mattress to sleep on, three square meals a day, and a tiny pay cheque at the end of the month.

 

And that, surely, is a crime that deserves punishment.

 

Helping hands

These days it is easier than ever to outsource your life

Growing up in Calcutta as a little girl, the high point of my year was the annual visit of my aunt who lived in London and could be relied upon to arrive laden with presents. But as I grew up, I came to realize that this was the high point of the year for my aunt as well. Not just because she loved us and missed us – which, of course, she did – but because this gave her some much-needed respite from domestic chores.

While in London, she had to do the cooking and wash up afterwards, make and unmake the beds, vacuum the house, and even give the toilets a good scrubbing, in Calcutta all these tasks were the responsibility of cooks, maids and cleaners. So, for the month that she was here, she could sit back and relax while the endless work that is involved in running a house, was delegated to paid help.

You don’t know how lucky you are in India, she would constantly tell my mother. And my mother, with her gift for pessimism, would grimly reply that it was only a matter of time before India went the way of England as well. By the time I grew up, she informed me, it would be impossible to get household staff. People of my generation would have to do what my aunt did; take care of the household chores ourselves.

Well, in a way, my mother was right. It is getting increasingly difficult (and much more expensive) to get help these days as social mobility kicks in – and that’s just how it should be. But strangely enough, even though domestic help is getting harder to find, people like us are doing less and less for ourselves. In fact, as I look around at my peer group the thing that strikes me the most is how we have managed to outsource most of the drudgery associated with everyday living, taking advantage of two-job families and the disposable income that comes with it.

The most visible symbols of how we have outsourced our lives are such taxi services as Uber and Ola. Even those of us who have cars, don’t bother to take them out every day (or, for that matter, hire drivers to lessen our burden). Who wants the hassle of maintaining a car, battling road rage as you try and negotiate traffic, finding parking space wherever you go, and renewing insurance every year, when you can tap into an app on your phone and get a chauffeur-driven car at your location in a matter of minutes? There can’t be a more fuss-free way of going to work, heading out for the evening, getting back home, or even running errands.

Except, of course, that even those errands have become fewer and fewer over the years. There is, for instance, no need to go shopping for groceries or fruits and vegetables. Yes, you guessed it, there is an app (or rather several) for that. And if you don’t want to go digital, you can simply phone your neighbourhood store and get all you want delivered at your doorstep at no extra cost (though it’s always a good idea to tip the delivery guy).

If you are fond of cooking, you don’t need to do the drudge work of prepping your ingredients. There are apps that will source all the ingredients for the meal of your choice, clean them, chop them up, and send them to you in a pretty little box. If you are on a diet, there are apps that will deliver healthy meals for all days of the week.

And if at the end of a long day the last thing you want to do is toil in the kitchen, there is always Swiggy, which will bring the cuisine of your choice to your doorstep. No need to employ a cook, whose repertoire is necessarily limited. Now, the whole restaurant world is your virtual kitchen and you can order anything you like at any time. Serve yourself on paper plates and you won’t even need to do the washing up.

In fact, given the kind of services that are available to us these days there is very little reason to put ourselves out at all. You can download tutoring programmes that will help your kids with their homework when you can’t. There is no need to leave the house to catch a movie; you get the best of programming on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar, which you can enjoy from the comfort of your couch.

There may be a dearth of household help in the market, as young men and women opt out of domestic service. But that gap had been filled by such housekeeping services as Urban Clap (disclaimer: I have never used them and have no idea how good or bad they are) that will, for a reasonable sum send over a team of workers to your house to give it a good going over. You can choose the frequency  and the range of services and have a spanking clean house without the palaver of managing domestic staff.

So, I guess in a way, both my aunt and mother were right. My mother, when she pronounced the imminent death of domestic help. And my aunt, when she claimed that we in India had no idea how lucky we were.  

We may no longer have in-house staff like we used to, but we still manage to outsource our lives quite efficiently – and cheaply. Though how long that will last is anybody’s guess.

  

My kind of woman

How can you tell whom you are likely to be best mates with?

There are some questions that always pop up when a group of young girls gets together. Who is your kind of man? What qualities do you look for in a guy? How would you like your future husband to be?

The answers are often as hackneyed as the questions. The words ‘tall, dark and handsome’ have been known to be uttered. As have ‘sensitive and caring’. A sense of humour is always touted as a desirable quality. And everyone wants a well-educated, even ambitious, man though only a few will admit to looking out for a rich one.

I guess all of us start out with a mental checklist against which we judge any potential mates. It is another matter that this checklist is the first thing to go out of the window when true love strikes. Then, it doesn’t matter if he stands a couple of inches shorter than you or how deep his pockets are. It doesn’t matter if his jokes are unfunny and he doesn’t have a hint of a six pack. And it certainly doesn’t matter that he doesn’t look like one of those pin-ups you idolised throughout your teenage years.

Once you’ve fallen in love, even the most unsuitable of creatures begins to look like your ideal man. And no matter what he is or how he is, he magically metamorphoses into your kind of man.

But then, that’s love for you. It has the knack of turning the world on its head. It has a way of making everything you once believed in seem futile and foolish. As the song goes: “I stand alone without belief; the only truth I know is you.”

Perhaps that is why I have never wanted to define – not even in my head – who my kind of man would be. At some subliminal level I guess I always believed that when I met him, I would know.

But women – ah, now we’re talking. I’ve always been very clear in my head about who my kind of woman is. (And just so we’re clear, by that I mean the kind of woman I could be friends with; not one whom I dream of having babies with.)

It all began – as things tend to do – in school. It didn’t take me long to realise that I wasn’t really cut out for sport and rough-housing of any kind. So hanging out with the sporty, tomboy types was out of the question. Instead, all potential friends had to pass what I called the ‘Do you read Enid Blyton?’ test and only those who had read everything from the Secret Seven to the Famous Five and the Mallory Towers series were in with a chance.

As I grew older, this test was further refined. Anyone who dissed Georgette Heyer as just another romance writer was off my radar in less time than it took to say Beau Brummel. Later still, all those who regarded Ayn Rand as the Fountainhead of all wisdom got short shrift. And more recently, Dominick Dunne has become my litmus test for People Like Us (or, more accurately, People Whom I Like).

But books are just the beginning. The tests of incipient friendship extend far beyond them. Take bread, for instance. No, I mean that. Take bread. Go on, take it. Break off a morsel, slather on some butter, or dip it in olive oil, and plop it into your mouth. Um, delicious, isn’t it?

What? You don’t eat bread? Or carbs of any kind, except on the weekend? Oh well, it was nice knowing you, but this kind of abstention spells goodbye in my book.

In fact, truth be told, food can be a landmine littered with the corpses of would-be friends. You want to share a salad? A salad? Seriously? You can’t even commit to an entire portion of lettuce leaves and rocket finished off with a touch of balsamico? Sorry, but that’s a deal-breaker for me. (Now, sharing a dessert – a nice, gooey, chocolaty concoction – that I can totally get on board with.)

Okay, you got me. I like a woman who enjoys her high-calorie treats, who doesn’t shy away from a bit of pasta or a slice of pizza. I like a woman who has an appetite and is not afraid to feed it. Though it can get a tad annoying if she stays startlingly thin at the end of all that face-stuffing.

And then, there are those women whom I know I would simply never get along with in a million years even if they shared my reading lists and my love for a perfectly crisp French fry. These are just some of the categories that come to mind:

·         The kind of women who wear high heels on long-haul flights. You see them at airports all the time, teetering on laughably high stilettos, mincing along on shoes that look more like torture instruments. These are the women who would puncture the evacuation slide if the plane ever had to make an emergency landing. You want to steer clear of them.

·         Women who are rude to waiters. Though, to be fair, this one applies to men as well.

·         Women who treat their domestic staff badly. It doesn’t matter how beautifully you behave in company if you go back and terrorise your house help. If you can’t treat the people who clean and cook for you – and look after your children for good measure – with respect (if not love) then what hope is there for the rest of us?