The Bai Chronicles - II : Itna paisa mein itnaich milenga!

Bai chronicles is back! And this time, I'll talk about a very touchy subject - Pagaar, as in pay. Now, all of employed India, indeed all of the employed world operates on an overworked yet underpaid model. (Is someone somewhere listening?) Even members of the mafia might perhaps believe that they need to be paid more for all that 'conscience killing', 'mental trauma', 'haunting nightmares', 'additional risk of hanging out with super mean boss' etc etc. Well in reality, if that last point did indeed have a yardstick for measuring proposed compensation, 'Is anyone listening again??? Please?'

But while all of us may have serious pay scale issues, most of us are not in that super enviable position that goes with bargaining capabilities. In my humble experience, negotiating one's pay and achieving the life, work and pay one wants is stuff dreams are made of, and only the high and mighty, who perhaps have a core competence anyone would kill for can hope to achieve that enviable state! But as it turns out, our Bais almost always have bargaining power. Especially the awesome ones! And while us pitching a 10% upgrade in pay would perhaps meet with a 'It was nice talking to you, but we'll get back if we have a spot vacant for you', vis-a-vis the maids in Mumbai, they manage to easily wrest out at least a 30% increment per job!

Now, there was this lady who came to work for us once. She came with an awesome recommendation from this lady in a neighboring building. Why did this lady send me this maid, well, once I wept out my 'dukh-bhari-bin-baai-kahaani' to this lady at a shop, and she commiserated with me over a tetra pak of milk. So this maid came over, and I explained all her tasks to her. She listened carefully. And then I asked her the all-important, pain inducing question. 'Kitna legi'? 'Hazaar rupya'. I was over the moon! A thousand bucks! Wow! a true bargain indeed. Given that this lady was trying to find her bearings in the 'baai market' and get herself some 'kaayam ka kaam... (permanent employment), I felt that I had found my very own 'Ramu Kaki'. I imagined myself several years down the line, in horn-rimmed glasses, a streak of gray hair on my well maintained tresses, sitting on my porch with a news paper, saying 'Mandaaaa, ek chaai lana zara' (Manda, can you get me a tea please). And I saw this lady, a few wrinkles on her face walking over with my tea in clean polished China, setting it down, and informing me that the grandkids have left for school and.... 'Total chaar kaam ke liye chaar hazaar maheene ka'. (For 4 tasks, 4000 bucks a month).

'What?' I screamed, almost. 'But we're two people in the house! And both of us leave for work early in the morning. Given Mumbai's sterling real estate scene, I honestly don't live in a palace! We both eat out. So why exactly did she want a thousand bucks to wash four and a half utensils and another 1000 bucks to wash 5 pieces of clothes? Most of my clothes go to the dry-cleaners anyway (thanks to the new fashion trend of jewel encrusted necklines! Bah). And since when did sweeping and swabbing, the legendary, hyphenated jhaadu-patta become two tasks? I gulped in horror, as she stood steadfast, unrelenting. I explained all this to her and all she said was, 'Itna paisa lagega itne kaam ke liye'. When I asked her to be reasonable, all she said was, 'Bhabhi, yeh address mein aake kaam karne ka paisa toh lagega na? Parvadega nahin toh aisa area mein rehne ka nahin. Mere ko bhi bhaada dena padta hai na mere ghar ka? (If you want to live in such an address, you must be willing to pay. If you can't afford the maids of this area, perhaps you must live elsewhere. I need to pay my house rent too, right?) "Chalega toh bolo. Baaki bahut log waiting mein hai." (Lemme know if it works, or else I have a long list of prospective customers!)

I accepted my relative poverty and thanked the lady for her time, as I trudged back to the kitchen and sadly looked at my 4.5 utensils waiting for redemption. I, for sure was not willing to give up a part of my salary so that Manda Baai could pay her house rent. I was not willing to over pay for what I believe is a highway robbery and a plain play on my weaknesses! After doing the dishes, as I sat with a cup of tea and the newspaper, I saw this piece that said that Prince William and Kate Middleton are having trouble keeping a maid, as no one is willing to do all that work for a mere 20,000 pounds a year! Suddenly I felt like a princess!!!

The Bai Chronicles - I

Maids have been in the news recently, for all the wrong reasons! What started a couple of years ago with Shiney Ahuja in India, seemed to afflict even the ex-IMF chief, and our very own Terminator took the idiocy a step further, by literally 'keeping a house' with his housekeeper! So much for maids dictating people's lives! And I thought that I was the only one with the dubious honor of having allowed my maid to wrap my whole life around her little finger! I seem to have a horoscope that shuns hired help! If a maid so much as dares to agree to come work at my place, Rahu, Ketu, the maid's 'marad', the aunty who lives upstairs who incidentally was her ex-employer all wreak havoc with my peace and cruelly whisk her away. If I fight against my stars and manage to find someone (fight sounds nice, but plead with every maid who walks past my building gates is more like it) she ends up being someone with the work ethic of a vagabond!

So once this lady made bold and came home, with the intention of being employed by us. How my anti-maid track record went off unnoticed is beyond me. Praise be to the fact that she was just recently married and she'd only just come from her gaon! I explained everything to her and she said she'd work here! Yaaaaayyyyy, I almost screamed out loud. She then asked me to keep her number just in case. "Madam, aapka number do, mein meees call maarti hoon", she said, pulling out a swanky looking touch screen phone from a decrepit plastic bag. I thought back about my own strictly functional, terribly scratched, un-stealable brick phone and told her that my phone was in the other room, and that she should give me a call and I'd store the number when I next saw the phone! The next day, a Saturday, I got myself a hair appointment, having found a new found freedom from 'bhaandi ghaas' and 'jhaadu'! I walked over to the salon, and savored every moment of freedom. I had to spend a good 4 hours there, getting my hair straightened. I made the cautious, half-hopeful call back home and was very happy to know that the lady with shining cell phone had indeed turned up. I relaxed and went through the intense hair-straightening experience, at peace with the world!

The next day, while I was on a strict 'no water on your hair' and an even stricter 'no clips on your tresses' and the strictest 'no hair behind ears' routine, the morning was slipping by, and there was no sign of the woman of the moment! Fearing the worst, I made The Call! The call didn't go through. Thinking my dilapidated phone was perhaps to blame, I tried with another phone. Yet no luck. Frantic attempts later, amidst a massive cacophony that sounded more like a movie theater in the background, a voice answered. 'Haan, mein baahar hai. Kal aake baat karega'. And click. No explanations, whatsoever. Not even a courteous moment of conversation to a lady whose hair was saturated with chemicals! Anxious to know why she hadn't turned up, I tried calling her again. She cut my call. Not to be put off so easily, while feeling a little embarrassed myself, I decided to try one last time. And I was met with the dreaded 'Jya numbershi tumhi samparka saadhu icchitat, toh sadhya banda aahey'. I gave up. Wrapping a scarf around my chemically endowed tresses, I set to work. Hoping the few thousands I'd belted out on my hair wouldn't literally be washed down the sink.

The next day, the dame arrived and declared that her marad felt that she was working too much and hence she shouldn't come work here any more! Aaaaagh! "Tell your marad to talk to me!' I almost begged. I would have gladly bribed that marad fellow to just let my cellular maid stay! 'Nahin. Kal poora din mere peeth mein darad tha. Uthne ko hi nahin hua! Mera marad na bolta hai', she said. (Apparently her back was in agony all day yesterday and her husband told her no more working!) I was tempted to ask her whether her house was a movie theater and the seats there comprised of her bed, but I wanted to salvage the bai as much as I could! As it turned out, the love shove between them was too much to fall for bribes, increased pay, lesser work et al and I was left again with straight hair and no maid!

I have a billion such stories and I could write a whole book on my maidscapades! But so much for now!

Driving me crazy - II

Couldn’t quite help it. I resisted the urge. Turned my thoughts away as my fingers tingled. But try as I might, I just could not resist putting up my thoughts on the perils of driving in Mumbai. And I know I might sound like the eternal cribber, given that, and I guess I must be lucky to not know this first hand, Mumbai traffic on any day is much better organized than maybe the rest of India! But, cribbing and complaining are second nature to women and so, here goes – driving me crazy – Part II. Part I is right here.

Try driving in a marketplace on a Sunday afternoon. Well, I did. Out of an innate laziness towards walking into the market, although I still claim I drove because the shopping list I had was humongous. Regardless of that, one hot, hungry Sunday afternoon, I set off into a marketplace, windows rolled up, sunglasses on my eyes, music in my ear, et al. I believed that people generally run errands on Saturday and take Sunday easy. So I assumed I’d be able to park, well at least park, if not park easily. As it turned out, the whole road was a parking lot. The road was filled with damsels in distress! Indeed parking lights were supplanted by the distress signal! People would just swoop into the roads and, well, STOP. At one such sample, I let out a louuuuuuuuuud honk, only to be met by nothing in response. Irritated, I wanted to move into an alleyway which I guessed would be less congested, only to find the entrance to the alley shut off by, yes, another parked car!

Distressed, annoyed, frustrated and with an aching ankle, (imagine driving for 15 minutes in first gear!), I cursed the traffic police under my breath. I complained to myself, lamenting why they were always absent on Sundays. Or any day when you wanted them most. I almost converted to Keynesianism, having sufficiently understood that the upwardly mobile Indian (read Mumbai) population, most definitely needed strict policing, to be held in check. If only there was one cop somewhere, maybe, just maybe things would be calmer. I could perhaps drive on the road, listening to my music, rather than wishing my horn would play a tune I liked! Maybe, I’d have to honk more at oblivious people, rather than at cars parked on the road, in a manner that looked as if the whole place had been hit by a hurricane. Maybe, I might have been able to finish my work and go on home, and stop my poor tummy from growling in anger!

The frustration gave way to a new determination. I decided that when in Rome, I will do as Romans do. Much as I hated it, I decided to park in the middle of everywhere myself and proceed to the shops to get my work done. To hell with road etiquette. To hell with my motto of ‘drive like you would want others in front of you to drive’. And I parked in front of the shop where I had to pick up the most number of things. I felt a weird sense of guilt, but I marched on regardless. I picked up the olives, the pasta, the sauces, the everything, thinking happily about the prospect of some food soon. I bought myself a bar of chocolate to keep my tummy at bay till that time and went on picking things off the aisles. Presently, I finished shopping.

A very large bag in tow, I finally stepped out, to find a large chalk mark at the place where I’d parked, with a message there asking me to come to the nearest police station and pick up my car!

Bambai ki Baarish

This one is for the rains of Mumbai. The other day I happened to talk to a friend who recently moved to Mumbai. I told her that she has come at the perfect time to Mumbai, since Mumbai rains are nothing short of poetic. She in turn told me that she hated the rains and that she preferred hot weather! But I felt that she was missing out on something in life, by not really savoring the icing on the cake called Mumbai.

For me, the rains are synonymous with cloudy, dark skies, pouring rain, a calm, chilled weather outside, rainwater trickling down the long clear glass window panes, a mug of piping hot coffee in my hand, a good book in the other and perhaps Enigma, Enya or Yanni playing in the background. And then living in a city by the sea, rains mean huge tidal waves that lash against the wavebreakers off Mumbai's sea coast. Rains bring on those huge waves that send in misty sprays all over Marine Drive and Worli Sea Face. A picture of a rainy day would perhaps be incomplete without the swaying coconut trees and mellow, non-bright afternoons.

This does not mean that the rainy season is a period of vacation for everyone in Mumbai. But rains bring out the quick-dry synthetic outfits, the all-season footwear, the psychedelic umbrellas, kids in bright colored rain coats, squeaky clean looking cars (thanks to a free car wash), and everything left looking as fresh and clean as new. The leaves of trees that had been covered in soot all along would suddenly look clean and green! And of course, rains bring out the coal-powered segris and with them, the ever-enjoyable corn, called Bhutta in Mumbai. The corn is roasted on the coal stoves, and then garnished with lemon, salt and chilly powder and a bite of something as delicious with the salty monsoon winds billowing against one's hair is nothing short of beautiful. And topping it off with a sip of 'tapri chaai' or the piping hot roadside tea while standing under the canopy of the chaiwallah's electric blue plastic sheet - ETHEREAL!

Some of my friends complain that I love Mumbai to the extent of almost condoning everything that is not so good about her. And so, in an honest effort to be unbiased, my favorite rains do bring along a flip side. Heavy rains, though lovely, remain so as long as they are being enjoyed in the cosy confines of a house or an office building. The very thought of commuting in such weather is enough to bring out the groan from every Mumbaikar, even the kattarpanthi enthusiasts like me. Water-logging in places is a reality, although I'd like to believe that the volume of water logging has come down in the recent years. Trains get delayed and sometimes, water logged tracks in the heart of the city cripple train transport. Water-logged roads cause vehicular traffic to literally grind to a halt and the already dreadful traffic becomes unbearable. Walking in potholes and puddles is annoying for adults, although these are the highlights for kids!

Now that the 'unbiasing' is out of the way, I'll get back to the beauty of the rains. Imagine sitting inside a car watching the raindrops trickle down beautifully down the windscreen. Or imagine seeing the occasional raindrop clinging on to the tip of a clean, green leaf or the petal of a flower. Or sit by the window and look at the drenched crow trying to shake itself dry! And while seeing all this, just smell the scent of mud freshly soaked in rainwater. And then decide whether rains aren't a thing of beauty to be enjoyed and savored as much as you can!

School results and Suicides - an alarming trend

Trends on Tuesday

And the boy tied a belt around his neck, latched the other end on a fan and kicked the chair beneath him.... She ran up to the terrace of her building, looked back one last time and jumped.

No, these are not endings of a set of Gus Van Sant movies. These are alarming trends facing the urban youth of today in a super competitive India. A few years ago, when we were in school, suicides soon after results were unheard of. But now, we have suicide helplines, huge long winded articles in major newspapers, and even shows on TV that try to counsel kids against taking that drastic step.

When did such a dire situation come about and why? Peer pressure to perform is perhaps one of the biggest reasons. Yeah, almost all of us know that peer pressure is the cause of practically all problems facing the youth. But why do some succumb to peer pressure and some others don't? The answer may not be too obvious, but somewhere the stress that people lay on academics and their importance in lives is perhaps key. For instance, in some houses, people tell the kids to work hard. But a few slip ups here and there are perhaps forgotten. In some other households, the pressure to perform is very high. Somehow, the impressionable minds are given the view that if they do not score those 99% marks, their lives are finished. Well, fear is a good tactic to get human beings to work. But somewhere, in kids, the fear has to be offset as well. Which unfortunately isn't happening.

If we delve deeper, the issue can also be with the education infrastructure. Too few opportunities for too many people. Few seats in the IITs. Few really good colleges. add to it the seats eroded due to reservation and kids have precious few opportunities. And academic lineage does matter while getting into universities abroad or even into premier schools in India. The kids really at risk are not the average or below average ones, for they manage to do something or nothing at all. The kids at risk are the ones a notch below the best. The ones who fall in the 'just missed' category, who set their goals on the best and fall into despair when they miss. So the issue is complex and the resolution perhaps lies in proper counselling and hand holding services, not just for kids but for their families as well. Somewhere someone needs to tell the super moms and super dads that it is ok to fail once in a while. For with every fall comes the effort to rise again and that effort builds a true human being.

But till then, the spate of suicides and botched suicide attempts soon after school exam results is a scary trend. It really is insane, for a 16 year old who is considered too immature to vote or buy alcohol or even drive, decides that a few low marks in an exam have the capacity to break his/ her life! It is a very gory foreboding of future trends that need to be checked before it is too late. India has a young working population to look up to in the future. The last thing we need is our competitive nature getting the better of us.

Maximum City - an urban nightmare

Mondays in Mumbai

Annoying horns, crackling firecrackers, the annoying digging noise of a digger somewhere, dust flying all over the place. Seems like a scene straight out of a day in Mumbai? Yes. What happens when you try to fill a water balloon and keep pouring water in beyond what the balloon can carry? That is exactly what is happening to Mumbai. Maximum city is bursting at its seams. Despite being a Mumbaiphile, despite how much it hurts me to write this piece, it is the truth!

To keep up with the urbanization spree, the infrastructure needs to grow. So everyone needs bigger roads and more buildings. And now, India is a growth story with Mumbai as one of its central characters. So, people are getting more affluent. As the standard of living increases, people grow aware of heretofore unknown entities like status symbols and so on. So, in a new phenomenon that is gripping Mumbai, people buy 4 cars per household! 2 small cars, and 2 SUVs, all for a family of maybe 4! Given the affluence, people hire a driver for a small sum a month and absolve themselves of the sorrows of driving in Mumbai. The result - the ever burgeoning need for more flyovers and even bigger roads! As the number of rich people grows, room at the bottom and the middle of the pyramid is let up and more poor people migrate into the city. This puts a pressure on public transport, the buses and trains in Mumbai, which till date have been hailed as the best in India! But even these have a set capacity which cannot be overshot.

The result - the balloon bursts. Crowds have become unimaginably huge such that traveling by public transport is literally painful. Augmented crowds lead to discomfort and whole lot of rage in an already stressed out city! Fine, so one could choose to travel in his own vehicle. But what will you do when someone chooses to take his SUV through rush hour traffic? He probably wouldn't realize the agony he is causing by choking up an arterial road in peak traffic, since he is perhaps being driven! And everybody else on the road has to put up with the ordeal of having to traverse a 20 minute distance in 2 hours. Add to the mess the pain of incessant honking, which adds on to the noise and unbeknownst to us augments our stress levels. Another major problem is the noise pollution that people in houses need to bear. An arterial road goes past their apartment building and they have to bear the noise of vehicles, sirens and honks all day and all night. This is a slow poison which has the capacity to increase stress levels and cause a whole slew of physiological as well as psychological problems!

What can be done? Well thankfully, a lot. In terms of urbanization, Mumbai is not the pioneer, nor is India, for that matter. So we have loads of precedents to fall back on. So, for the public transport infrastructure, decidedly we need wider roads, although not at the expense of trees and mangroves. We need more trains and more buses, or even more double decker buses! As far as road congestion goes, we can adopt rationing on the basis of number plates, as has been done in Brazil, which has the world's worst traffic congestion record. Or even adopt a penalty system for vehicles with single occupancy during peak hours, as has been done in Singapore. Another idea could be imposition of a prohibitively high tax on the third vehicle entering a household - a modification of the high purchase tax regime of Hong Kong. And as for the noise, well, putting up sound barriers or noise absorbent boards along arterial roads and expressways is a practice followed all over the developed world, to shield residential areas from road traffic noise. Surprisingly that mechanism is totally absent in India. Provincial parks and anointed green zones are essential in Mumbai, to check pollution levels as well.

All in all, strong and immediate steps need to be taken to preserve Mumbai's sanity. Or the very things that attract people to Mumbai and keep them there could turn to haunt them and perhaps even shoo them away!

The story of the parking spot!

A busy day. Loads of cars on the street. A place. One parking spot looks available, since someone is just backing out. You notice it and you stop strategically a few steps away from that outgoing car. Just a few minutes later, another car pulls up on the opposite side after seeing the outgoing car backing out. Outgoing car backs out, the spot is open, up for taking. What happens? The answer - IT DEPENDS.

If I am somewhere in the non - desi part of North America or UK, I can be sure that I'll get a smile from the other contender, who'll perhaps just shrug and turn his wheel to go look for other spots.

If I am in Mumbai, well, the story is totally different. First, we begin with a slurry of honks. Since everyone is scrounging the parking lot looking for a spot, everyone is slow. But the guy behind me couldn't care less, since for him, I might have slept off behind the wheel. Then when we see this spot, the situation can vary depending on who I am in competition with. If the other contender is a young, brash, spoilt brat driver, I can be assured that I am better off getting out of there. Simply because such kids drive a Honda Civic as if it were a Lamborghini! How they manage to achieve that sportscar kind of pickup in a sedan is beyond me. If it's a woman behind he wheel, forget it, that opportunity for parking is lost. Having to fight for everything in the world, I guess makes them fiercely competitive. Enough to make grabbing that parking place a mortal battle of egos! And if I and the other contender are locked in a non-verbal battle of who can take the spot, a cabbie will thrust his nose in, and park even as we both start hurling abuses his way. And after parking, he'll just turn around, give a couple of abuses himself and walk off!

And if this were happening in Delhi, most of the above cases may remain, except that as a woman driver, I might have to even face a couple of lecherous winks as well! It's almost like giving this premise to 3 different directors - Satyajit Ray, Karan Johar and Sajid Khan! The output is gruesomely different. But that's how they are!!!

MUMMMM- BAI

It's sultry and hot outside. The sun keeps beating down on mere mortals like me most mercilessly. The time - 9 am. I am on vacation and my mind is wired that way now. Prospect of physical work, even if that means simply washing my coffee mug seems anathemic! And I feel thankful to the lady who waltzes into my house at half past 9, and cleans up the mess made over all of yesterday. For the world she is my 'bai', or my hired help, but for me, she's GOD!

Getting the perfect Bai is impossible. The hunt is akin to finding the perfect husband. Don't laugh at my comparison. Try living in a city like Mumbai, where half our life is spent running behind local trains and the other half is spent stuck in traffic. With the kind of building and construction work happening on every road in Mumbai, whether or not air is ubiquitous, dust and dirt certainly is. So, it becomes even more essential to have someone who will clean the house and leave it spic and span and shining day after day. Else it wouldn't take too much effort to convert a cute urban Mumbai house into a Gothic cobweb covered castle. Nah.. the enormous space of a castle can never belong to a Mumbai house. Or let me say that a sprawling Mumbai house is as much a reality as say the tooth fairy.

So, now that we know that the Bai is indispensable, finding the right and best one is the hunt for El Dorado. Each time you hire someone, you strike a compromise. It's either their pay, the work they'd do, or even their leave policy. Not that they have casual leaves and privilege leaves, leave policy here is whether they would go on informed leave or go AWOL! Simple! And once you hire them, soon you find that they do not really deliver all that they promise in the first place. So, utensils may still show signs of what was for dinner yesterday or the corners would be swept so clean that every week a petrified me would need to run armed with a broom, behind a genetically modified spider. And the minute you try expressing your displeasure, they retort Channel V style, 'Itna Paisa mein Itnaich Milenga'. That is still fine. You can put up with that statement and ask them to raasta naapo. The worst is when they tag you. Not Facebook style, but when they say you do a lot of kitkit. Now kitkit is an epithet they use if you express your displeasure, albeit much too often. And like gossip, this tagging spreads like wildfire in the Bai community and they are as close knit as perhaps the Russian Mafia. (Psst, some of their tactics are similar as well).

And then comes the whole chutti aspect. They have hundreds of thousands of relatives in their Gaaon. What Gaon, God knows. And they have to attend every wedding, every child birth, every birthday, Gaon devi's Puja, Ganpati's Puja, Grandfather's brother's wife's uncle's grandson's first food function. And each such jaunt would imply leave for a minimum of 1 week and a maximum of 'Kabhi aayegi? Maalum Nahin Bhabhi'. Don't even get me started on the hunt for a makeshift Bai who is called Badli. A Badli Bai is looked down upon, as if she is someone who cannot hold on to a steady job. And one can't even tell the Badli Bai to hunt out the errant spider, since she can simply walk off, and not give a badli for the badli bai. You get the drift?

The Bai stories can be plenty. But as I sit back with my coffee and the newspaper, I need to thank my stars for my current Bai who is a thorough professional and does a clean job.

I guess I spoke too soon, for my watchman just told me that the All Bai union has pulled out a strike and every Bai walking towards my part of the city is being forcibly told to walk back home or 'face the consequences'. Sigh! The house needs to be swept and swabbed. The sink is full of utensils, I wonder why I had that dinner party last night. The sun is still pelting down on us. Life could not get any better. And my Bai is missing.