Odd Jobs
I was watching one of the Indian movies and in one of the scenes hero shopping in a retail shop hands over the credit card to the cashier and the cashier hands it over to another guy who is employed out there just to swipe the credit card.
It’s really amazing the kind of manpower we have in India and the kind of work people are ready to do. I am not making fun of the guy swiping the credit card. These are some people desperate to earn money to make their ends meet.
There are lots of resources available in India who is ready to do odd jobs to make life of middle and upper class easier and comfortable. Even though what they are doing is sad, I think the kind of comfort you can afford in India cannot be imagined by normal middle class here in US.
But the plights of people who are doing such jobs are sad though.
What do you think?
2 comments:
Odd jobs created just to employ people but to not serve specific business purposes is not luxury, but serious ineffiency in the system. Instead what is needed is growth in the jobs market to actually create jobs that solve specific business problems.
Frankly, (and as an example) - who would want their credit cards handled by 3 individuals in a store for one transaction? Every "hand" is a security and error risk.
Also, "luxury" in India is a misperception. It is a process of taking a condition from unacceptable to barely accceptable and calling it "luxury". For example, even after you have hired scores of "servants" to clean your house, toilets and clothes, what they have done is brought up the condition of things from grossly unclean to acceptable (especially toilets). And in the US, we get acceptable cleanliness as a "default standard". And when I clean my "acceptable toilet" in the US on my own, it becomes "luxurious".
With me?
The "Luxury" argument in India is bogus except for perhaps the 1% of VERY VERY RICH, who live in a "bubble of luxury" within India and don't have to interact with normal India on a day to day basis. For everyone else who has to live in normal India, "luxury" is a very relative and downwardly definable condition as compared to the west..
From your reply I can deduce that
luxury is a very relative term.
I guess what one person perceives or thinks of as luxury may not seem as a luxury to others.
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