"Can I help you?"

I’ve been putting this blog off for a while, trying to figure out ways to make it funny or engaging enough to rival my husband’s recent comment-soliciting posts. Clearly, moving halfway around the world sets everything topsy-turvy—suddenly Jimmy’s the funny one and I’m the one who’s gone all soulful. While I realize I run the risk of revealing myself as a total geek with the following statement, the truth cannot be denied. So here goes. The Indian economy is fascinating.

India suffers from rampant unemployment, but some locals suggest its not because of a scarcity of work. I’ve had students and adults alike praise the American sensibility they dub “the dignity of labor,” while simultaneously bemoaning the lack of this quality in a large portion of their countrymen. Apparently, a lot of the local unemployment is voluntary—stemming from folks feeling too proud to engage in more menial tasks. I suspect the generalization is just that, but there must be some truth in it somewhere. Oddly enough, my husband—perhaps the most dignified of all laborers—is forbidden to work by his tourist visa lest he fill a job a resident might.




From what we’ve seen, there would be a lot of options. While the States seems obsessed with efficiency and low overheads, India is prioritizing providing work for as many as they can at once. So what if at home I was waited on by maybe three people at the Gap when I’d go to buy a pair of jeans (the one who would dig out my size from the giant piles in the back, the dressing room attendant, and the cashier—all of whom had been students of mine at one time, all of whom were chatting happily away on their fancy headsets and wondering what Bradbury was doing in their store). To be honest, anti-social, clothing-phobic me often felt smothered by all the attention. But in my first few adventures to FabIndia—a local clothing store franchise—I was waited on no fewer than 10 people. One to open the door, another to refold the items I pulled from the shelves with a military precision, one to help me find a matching dupatta, another to usher me to a dressing room. And this was just on the sales floor. The real action was at the checkout where one guy pulled the prices from my items, another entered them into the register, one pulled the printed receipt out of the old daisy wheel printer while two ace folders stood behind to package my garments. Then another person took my parcel to another counter where three more people processed it in different ways—including stapling another copy of the receipt to the top of the bag. Finally they waited for me to turn around and collect the bag by presenting my copy of the receipt, all the while acting as if I were collecting my car from a valet parking service (note that I’ve never actually done this). And this was a busy day—with countless other teams of employees assisting other customers.

Such specialization is a major ingredient of the employment and economy. You see it at all levels—the fact that the students at all the schools decide their career paths after the tenth grade board exams attests to this. In our neighborhood, we have a man who rides around every morning selling milk from his motorcycle, giant metal cans like industrial sized udders strapped to the sides. We have another who comes and fetches our clothes to be ironed. He takes the garments in the morning, returns them that evening and collects 2 Rupees per item.




But what really took some getting used to was the idea that a housekeeper had been hired to look after our three room apartment. Inderpreet let us know that this would probably happen and that the majority of middle class families had part time if not live-in help, but we always assumed we’d politely decline when we arrived. In point of fact, cleaning is more intense an affair than my occasional sweeping sessions and “gee, I don’t think the bathtub had that pink ring around the rim last month . . .” attitude back home. India is an exceptionally dusty place, clothes are washed by hand and hung to dry, and the brooms have very, very short handles. So even though Jimmy could easily do the dishes himself, we save them so Sudama, the class 11 student from a local government school, has something to do every day from 4 to 6. Jimmy pretends to mourn the surrender of his post as human dishwasher, but I’m not convinced.

But while our can-do American spirits sometime bristle at the thought of hiring an electrician to merely replace a fuse, we also realize that participating in the local economy here is something akin to backcountry camping. We want our impact to be as small and as positive as possible. That means haggling with rickshaw drivers to avoid overpaying to ensure that prices don’t rise for locals. Or letting a guy come and fix the toilet (yes it’s working now!) for 50 Rupee instead of Jimmy buying a wrench and doing the job himself. Maybe that’s why he’s the funny one now—he has the time. ☺

(Special thanks to Amanda, Kyle, and Christy as I suspect you’re the only ones econ-nerdy enough to make it all the way to the end of this post).