Memo From Mumbai

Exploring India’s Prosperity Through the Eyes of the Invisible Men

By ANAND GIRIDHARADASMUMBAI, India — Here in the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, what you think of the new India may depend on whether you are the person having soap squeezed onto your hands or the person squeezing the soap. In every men’s washroom at the Taj is a helper. As you approach the sink, he salutes you. Before you can turn on the tap, he does it for you. Before you can apply soap, he presses the dispenser. Before you can get a towel, he dangles one. As you leave, he salutes you again and mutters: “Right, sir. O.K., sir. Thank you, sir.” Step outside, and you see sedans reeking of new affluence. Inside are drivers, many of them asleep because they work 20-hour shifts, waking up at 6 a.m. to catch a train, taking the boss to and from work, then to his dinner, then to drinks, then dropping him off at home at 1 a.m. and catching a taxi to go back to the tenements. At 1 a.m. back in the boss’s apartment, the hallways are often littered with servants and sweepers who work inside by day but sleep outside by night. They learn to sleep on20cold tile, with tenants stepping over them when returning from evenings out. India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served. “Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.” The subject, usually overlooked, has been raised by a provocative new film depicting India from a servant’s-eye view. The movie, “Barah Aana,” by Raja Menon, tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people’s lives. In one scene, a wealthy homemaker, plump and accessorized with Louis Vuitton, zips through this city, formerly Bombay, in the back of her black sport utility vehicle, pattering on the phone. Suddenly, her chauffeur slams on the brakes, jostling the woman and interrupting her conversation. “That beggar child came in front of my car,” s he explains indignantly to her friend after resuming her call. “That idiotic driver just put on the brake.” In another scene, a security guard, Yadav, discovers that his son is ill and will die if he does not receive treatment costing $150. He goes around his building asking for loans from tenants who think nothing of spending $40 on pizza. The tenants, glued to their televisions, treat him like a puppy to be shooed away. That night, as he sits with friends and fills himself with drink, he contemplates what it would mean to bury a son. “Why is it,” he wails, “that people can only feel their own pain, not others’?” The director’s answer is that India has something deeper than a poverty problem. It has, in his view, a “dehumanization” problem. In an interview, he described India’s employers and servants as living as “two different species.” The movie’s first half chronicles India’s small humiliations with a chilling realism. The second half prophesies an outbreak of violent revolts in a country where the elite have long comforted themselves with the thought that the poor will stoically accept their lot. The director’s belief is that such stoicism is drying up as the rich become ever more visibly rich, and the left-behind are ever more aware of their deprivation. The poor were long told that their poverty was deserved, Mr. Menon, the director, said. But now they see wealth everywhere, and they are starting to believe that poverty is circumstantial and can be reversed. “That’s when the dam bursts,” he said, “the moment the person feels, ‘It’s not true that this is my place.’ ” Such a moment seemed to occur one recent evening. The movie was shown to an audience of young, middle-class Indians, representatives of the country’s new prosperity. But one of them, a marketing manager named Mitesh Thakkar, 30, arrived with a taxi driver he often employs, and he injected diversity into the screening by inviting the driver in to watch the film. Mr. Thakkar reacted as one might when one’s social class has been indicted. The film was good but “one-sided,” he said. “Maybe there are 70 percent of the people who treat them bad, but there are 30 percent who treat them good.” But for the taxi driver, Javed Ali, 20, the movie was an instant classic. “This story is the truth,” he said. “Whatever was in my mind, the movie showed.” Mr. Ali said he knew the film’s humiliations firsthand. Sometimes people take his taxi and refuse to pay. Sometimes they are drunk and mistreat him. Some simply scream at him and say, “You’re no good,” he said. After the screen ing, some audience members, including Mr. Thakkar and Mr. Ali, went out for dinner. (Perhaps it was the film’s influence: to dine with a taxi driver in India is to cross a rarely traversed line.) The other diners wanted to know what Mr. Ali thought of the film. He answered, rather casually, that he understood their hunger, after so many years of humiliation, for revenge. “He said the part where the driver kidnaps his female boss — that he did the right thing,” Mr. Thakkar said later, recalling Mr. Ali’s comments. “Even though he got caught, she needed that kidnapping.” On that evening, at that table, with prosperous and poor side by side, India’s parallel realities fleetingly, ominously collided. It did not seem, from this admittedly limited evidence, that they would be reconciled anytime soon.

Pretty good .

This reminds me of an incidence when I was in Delhi. It was the wedding of my cousin where my family was invited. We decided to hire a cab(Indica) for this purpose. We arrived at the venue and driver stayed outside waiting for us to come back after the party. When it was a time for us to take dinner, I went outside and asked the Driver to come inside for Dinner as he might've been hungry. He smiled and said, 'Thank you, I am not hungry and have eaten. But, this is the first time that someone invited me inside". I could see the humility and pain in his voice, also to mention that innocent smile.

Unfortunately, people surrounded with their wealth are blinded by it. Nowhere exists that humility when getting along with their employees - be it driver, housemaid, helper, or security guy. I shouldn't generalize that this is the problem with India, but to the majority of rich people in India - yes! To them humanity only lies in the color of gold and flattering green money. Sad!