Privilege — Lost and Found
In India, people eat take-away from plates. It’s a behavior that stood out quite sharply to me, why would anybody want to use a washed plate for take-away that already comes in good packaging? And it’s not just the case with Indian food. They eat McDonald’s delivery from a plate. I’ve seen one of my flatmates take out his McD from the brown bag, unwrap the burger, place it on a plate, shake the fries out next to it, place the drink on it, and proceed to eat. Perplexing stuff.
And why does that seem weird to me? When I thought about it, I found one possible answer — maids. You see, having a maid is a very common, middle-class thing in India (and probably the rest of the subcontinent), and a fairly uncommon thing in most other countries— unless you’re rich. Growing up, my family and I ate pizza out of boxes, shawarmas out of wrappings, roasted chicken out of foil, even Indian food like biryani out of take-away boxes. Nobody wanted to get plates dirty, nobody wanted to have to take up the chore of cleaning them if it could be avoided. This only became more normal in Singapore, where take-away is culturally more ingrained than cooking at home, and of course, everybody eats from the take-away packaging. In India, there is cheap labor who will come in the following morning and do your dishes for you, no matter how many — 1 or 100.
When I was moving out of Singapore earlier this year, one of the things I was really looking forward to (while obviously also being nervous about) was the loss of privilege. I was going to be working in a bootstrapped start-up in India, my pay (in absolute terms) was going to be a small fraction of what I was making, and I thought that was going to bootstrap my life too and teach me to shed a lot of my privilege. When I first entered the house where I live now (which I agreed to take up online through a friend who lived there, without actually visiting the place because I was literally thousands of miles away), I remember being satisfied by my feeling of being taken aback. It’s a fairly tiny place with very little space to move around and I was going to be sharing it with 4 other people. As I went to bed that night (read as: mattress on the floor), I was happy that I would finally experience the hardships of living in India — something I had been wanting to do for a long time, something that I felt I needed at that point in life to grow.
And then, the next morning, the maids turned up. And I was like “WHAT, WE HAVE MAIDS?! O.O”. They did the dishes, swept and wiped the floors, did the laundry (we don’t have a machine), and even cooked. Upon asking my friend how often the maids would come, he gave me a weird look, “Uhm..everyday? The cook comes twice everyday actually”. I was dumbfounded. I had never imagined that bachelors — especially those at my economic level — could afford daily maids. Two of them, nonetheless.
Anyhow, picking my brain over the privilege of having maids, I headed out to my first day at work, and naturally took the bus. It was so cheap that I almost died of joy — Rs. 14, that’s like 30 cents (SGD). It stopped pretty far from my workplace though, about an 18 min walk, and summer was coming (I wish this were Westeros, but nah), so it only kept getting hotter everyday. Eventually, one day, I decided to check out the Uber prices. Pool was Rs. 49, from home to work, no walking. That’s $1. For 6 km. At first I thought the app may have miscalculated, but I knew it was true at the end of the ride. Obviously, now it’s an everyday thing to take a shared cab to work. A little while ago, there used to be this app that gave an additional 50% off on every second Uber ride, so there’s that too.
When I think about it, life is actually more comfortable for me here than it was in Singapore. Sure, there’s the whole annoyance of the infamous Indian bureaucracy whenever I need to get something official done. I got an Aadhaar Card that still doesn’t have valid biometrics registered, and I’ve been trying for 2 months to change it. I don’t have a proper bank account because you need to make an opening deposit using a cheque, and I don’t have my own cheque book so I can’t issue any (ah the paradoxes of opening your first bank account in India, I could probably write a Medium piece on my experiences with this alone). But these are mild and irregular annoyances. Sleeping on the floor (as long as there’s a mattress) is actually quite comfortable. Try it out if you haven’t yet.
So really, my attempt at losing privilege turned out to be one of gaining it. I have the privilege of time and comfort, because there are people who clean up my shit after me, because personalized commute is as cheap as it ever could be, because India is a funny place where you can be a bachelor with a maid who makes more money than you do. Indians are so privileged but most don’t even realize it (usually because they’re too busy complaining about the bureaucracy or haggling for a Rs. 10 bargain). But whatever be it, I’m still not moving to eating my take-away from a plate.
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