If Your Flight Attendant is Posh Your Country is Poor

I GET a spam call from a girl who asks which bank has issued my credit card, and I say, “Sperm Bank.” She asks if it is a foreign bank, then for the spelling. Listening to her, I am delighted at the progress the nation has made.

I am not being sarcastic, partly because sarcasm is the second lowest form of humour, but chiefly because her response is a good omen. Another day, I am as delighted when I hear a flight attendant struggle to make an announcement in both Hindi and English. Once, flight attendants were disturbingly articulate, some were even brilliant, and many of them had the bearing of professional models. In a cinema hall, I rejoice when the person behind a counter can’t tell the difference between 325 and 32.5, as though the dot is some design element. Also, baristas at coffee shops no longer have the urban swag that they used to when expensive cappuccinos first came to India. And in five-star hotels, new waiters display the meek wonder of those who come from places that have no five-stars.

There is an ideal mediocrity all around in some dreary professions. It is a sign that India has progressed so much that the smartest and the luckiest do not have to do jobs for which they may be overqualified. It is a sign that a segment of Indians who were once so inexpensive to hire that companies could afford them to do dreary work have priced themselves out of such work and moved to more complex or rewarding jobs, or at least dreary jobs with higher pays, or maybe have even opted to do nothing, which is not a bad way to be.

Until about 25 years ago, Indians went to a restaurant and just asked for “coffee.” Then the café-chain Barista opened and coffee appeared to be more complicated than we had thought. Now, the way Indians of my generation say, ‘cappuccino’ we make it look like we always knew how to say it. But at least I had to privately rehearse saying “cappuccino” so that I was not shamed in front of the suave barista who surely had adorable sisters. I noticed that such cool dudes were in McDonald’s, too, serving socially superior buns called burgers.

I felt it then, that there was something wrong if a guy who worked in such places seemed more refined than most of his customers. You may argue that this is exactly the case in a rich-world café even today—they are manned by the hip. But that is because they are students making side-money; or they only look expensive as most people appear in a rich society.

Early Barista should not have been able to afford the sort of youngsters who agreed to work there but they could. It was a short trend. The call-centre revolution came, and many of cool dudes in cafes moved on. The call-centre mania, too, pointed to a nation that was so poor that some of its smartest, or at least most articulate, could be absorbed by that industry. Engineers and science post-graduates sat through the night taking calls. Around then, I had a friend who could have chosen any field and chose to become a flight attendant because it paid her the most.

You could see this phenomenon at work in the Miss Universe or Miss World pageants, too. Generally, with some exceptions, beauty queens from rich countries were from modest backgrounds, while the women from poor countries were from socially advanced backgrounds, usually from the upper middle class or affluent strata of society. This was one of the reasons why the articulation of Indian beauty queens like Sushmita Sen or Aishwarya Rai appeared to be different from their competitors. All that has changed now.

As India grows richer, a class of people stop participating in some types of jobs, lower rungs of society move in. Today, even personal wealth managers are not all that urbane anymore. I find it odd some days that the great Alan Turing’s definition for an intelligent machine was that it should be indistinguishable from a human. Today, when I get a spam call from a smart, clear and articulate voice I suspect it’s not human.

You may argue that this is still a nation where thousands of graduates apply for menial jobs in the government. Two years ago about 40,000 graduates and 6,000 post-graduates did apply for a sweeper’s job in the Haryana government. But this only points to the farce of college degrees. These were people who probably felt the job befitted them irrespective of the laminated pieces of paper they somehow collected in the name of higher education.

The argument I am making is not that India has progressed enough to employ its whole workforce, but that it has progressed enough to ensure that some segments of smart people are too expensive to recruit for basic jobs. Just as rich nations hire Indians to do jobs their citizens do not wish to, urban India is beginning to dip into emerging social segments.

Meanwhile, some modest professions that were considered semi-skilled have become more gentrified. Once, when I had hair, I used to go to a place called Head Master, where a man who was called a ‘barber’ cut my hair for almost nothing. Then ‘salons’ opened, and I had to once again learn how to say the word, where young people who appeared richer than me and were called ‘hair stylists’ did the job.

But it is not clear to me anymore what the chic of India’s middle-class are doing. What professions have absorbed them? In all those physical and spectral places of my youth where the posh walked, it is today the average semi-rural Indian — on flights, cafes, five-star front desks, advertising, film production, women’s magazines, feature journalism, television news. Those cool dudes who used to make cappuccino and flight attendants who always knew how to pronounce it, if they were young today, where would they be and what would they be doing? I don’t see them around anymore. Maybe there was a wave of young people who appeared briefly in the late 90s and aughts, playing surprising roles, but do not exist anymore.

(Manu Joseph’s latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’.)