Not in Kansas Anymore

I know I promised y'all a post about funeral customs next but I'm going to write about everyday life in Mysore instead because I've had a couple of emails from people asking me about it. Besides, I thought it'd be a nice change for all concerned if I didn't write about death and my feelings of fragility -- so instead I'm going to switch back into cultural analyst mode.

Today, the big excitement is that we finally -- I hope -- have a maid again! I know how strange this will sound in Canada but it's impossible to manage in a place like this without someone to come in and do the chores for you. At least, it's impossible for me. And it's impossible for pretty much everyone I know -- of course, there's a class component to this: labour, especially women's labour is incredibly cheap here but it's also the everything-takes-more-effort setup of daily life here. Unbelievable amounts of dust come pouring into the house so it has to be swept at least once, but ideally twice, a day and the floors need to be swabbed to lay the dirt for a while. I haven't seen a dishwasher here, and there's no running hot water so imagine the quantity of dishes that pile up in a family household, with 4 or 6 or 8 people eating three meals a day and drinking numerous rounds of coffee and serving drinks and munchies to all the people who drop by. Also, there are generally no microwaves or ovens or even ranges so everything is cooked on two gas rings that run off calor gas cylinders. My family has the most antiquated washing machine you ever saw, that can only handle being run once a day (if that) because of how much power and water it sucks up -- water is "let out" by the city corporation between midnight and 3 or 4am and gets filled into a tank on top of the house. If your tank runs out during the day, oh well, too bad. I know lots of women who stay up till midnight to fill up additional buckets with water because their water tanks are too small or they're expecting guests who'll need extra water. Add things like bucket baths using hot water that's heated in an (electrified) copper water boiler, power outages at least twice a day, garbage that gets picked up only when the garbagemen feel like it, milk that needs to boiled and cooled before it can be used, and in our case, a family car that's older than ! am.... and is slowly falling apart (I kid you not -- yesterday, the rim on the inside of one door fell off!) and you get the idea of how ramshackle (my) life here is. Everything seems to be held together with string and cello-tape and I can't help worrying that the wheels are about the fall off altogether.

This isn't -- of course -- what everyone experiences in India or even in Mysore. It's possible to live here and at least inside your home or hotel room, not realize that you're not in Kansas anymore. Since the early 90s, a class that I'm going to call the New India has grown up around globalization and the tech and service industries in particular. This is a class that has access to the kinds of disposable income that my grandmother could never have imagined. They are for the most part young and English speaking and have grown into adulthood already entrenched in consumer culture. Apple's IPhone just launched in India, for instance, and it's certainly catering to this demographic. They have expensive (if usually bad) taste, drive new motorbikes or cars, eat out a lot and tend to live in the "Metros." A slightly older class of people who've benefited from globalization are those who've seen their property values go up -- increasingly, globalization has meant industrialization and the further movement of rural populations to urban centres and this new population needs accommodation. At the same time, the New India is reluctant to remain in joint-family living arrangements so there's more demand for smaller, single family living spaces. So apartment buildings -- unusual outside cities such an Bombay even as late as 15 years ago -- are going up everywhere, municipal facilities are failing to keep up with skyrocketing demand and property values in most urban locations have gone up exponentially.