4 ms·

The biggest shock my indian colleagues percieved when coming for few weeks into Europe - wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a

The biggest shock my indian colleagues percieved when coming for few weeks into Europe - wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands? Why are you living so poor? Their star-struck eyes about Switzerland very quickly sobered up, life aint a Bollywood movie. I've spent 6 months backpacking all over india, seeing all the dirty underbelly some decade and half ago, interacting mostly with poor and poorer. Life-changing, extremely intense, beautiful and harsh experience. Those indians getting to the west are mostly from those top layers like brahmins, not your usual poor hard working common indians - 'american dream' is hard to achieve anywhere, but is nigh impossible there, regardless of talents and hard work put in. Everybody knows it, and profit from it as much as they can. Young brahmin couple telling me its fine that 5 year old kids work in fireworks factories instead of going to school, at least they bring some money home. Small kids with various medical situations begging on streets. Some sights and their utter unfairness still haunt me to this day. I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core, for millenias. Upper castes dont give a nanofraction of a fuck about poorer people, their suffering. Yes, you can live there like a king on IT salary, maybe not in central Bangalore or Pune, but India is bigger than Europe in more than 1 way. Yet once you stop being poor, money is of little concern. Things like clean air, water and nature, safety, not having 50 C during summer, free good healthcare if not in US, free good education or social services are things we often take for granted, so do the immigrants over time. Life with some poor immitation of that is not that great, and it doesnt matter how high are the walls you build around yourself to shield yourself from the crap behind them, it simply ain't a great life. So, comparing how much one earns, or saves is largely meaningless in longer scale. You decide which system overall you want to live in and often raise your kids, the rest are details.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands? My colleagues from Israel also said they missed having cheap Arab maid back home that would take care of the house chores whereas in EU they'd have to pay over 20 Euros an hour which is out of their budget, for the wages here. Yeah mate, it sucks not having exploitable labor. /s >I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core Both India and China have a pretty nasty caste system.
- RedCondor 3y ago
  To whatever extent you want to misuse the term, America has more of a caste system than China.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    Okay ... how, in America do I get in-house "help" for a dollar, let's say per hour?
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      >Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workforce https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workf... >13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
      - f_devd 3y ago
        So, just make a timemachine to go back over 100 years, easy right?
reacharavindh 3y ago
Well, a lot to unpack here. I'm not going to disagree with the inequality, bad air quality, or the gap in development between the classes of people in India. But, as someone with one foot on either sides of the world, I'd like to caution against a closed-off narrative that sounds like "Look, this, this, and this are bad, so overall it is conclusively bad!". We humans all over the world develop as a society and are posed with different challenges that we solve very differently. I certainly have made my personal choice and moved around (US, Denmark, and now Netherlands), but that doesn't entitle me to say any particular world view _must_ be the good one. I for one, certainly miss the cultural openness, family bonds imposed on one by the typical South Indian society. I miss the attitude of "how do we get by and do this? no point in complaining that the government is failing to do blah, or relying on the safety net of a social system" - weird, I know. But, it gives you a certain mindset to look at things differently. I see this in my daily life with my Austrian wife and my son born in Denmark and being raised in The Netherlands - we(including myself) expect things to be in certain place, and feel entitled to them that we almost do not care. Look up the energy use and water use per capita in any western country versus that of India's and you'll see the eye-opening difference. India simply cannot afford to be as wasteful as the Americans or Europeans when the world is already lit on fire. Sure, western societies do not have underpaid home maids and servants, but the society here has been developing for a long time, and haven't had the misfortune of another country colonising them right during the industrial age and loot all of the resources and treating people like underpaid home maids and servants. Neither did they have the constraints of a warming climate dictating what or how much fossil fuel to burn to build out their infrastructure. India is huge, it has a different set of problems than the ones encountered by the western countries while they were developing. Over time, things will rationalise and I'm optimistic that the society will move towards the same priorities that the West has. But, I already cherish the secular credentials, diversity, innovation, and hard working populace of India. The scale of elections that occur that lead up to the election of the prime minister is a marvel to observe. I was only surprised to see the creme of the labour force(IT, one I happen to know) is already on par with the West that already seem to have it all. The rest will follow.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands? My colleagues from Israel also said they missed having cheap Arab maid back home that would take care of the house chores whereas in EU they'd have to pay over 20 Euros an hour which is out of their budget, for the wages here. Yeah mate, it sucks not having exploitable labor. /s >I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core Both India and China have a pretty nasty caste system.

RedCondor 3y ago
To whatever extent you want to misuse the term, America has more of a caste system than China.
- candiodari 3y ago
  Okay ... how, in America do I get in-house "help" for a dollar, let's say per hour?
  - RedCondor 3y ago
    >Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workforce https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workf... >13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
    - f_devd 3y ago
      So, just make a timemachine to go back over 100 years, easy right?

reacharavindh 3y ago

Well, a lot to unpack here. I'm not going to disagree with the inequality, bad air quality, or the gap in development between the classes of people in India. But, as someone with one foot on either sides of the world, I'd like to caution against a closed-off narrative that sounds like "Look, this, this, and this are bad, so overall it is conclusively bad!". We humans all over the world develop as a society and are posed with different challenges that we solve very differently. I certainly have made my personal choice and moved around (US, Denmark, and now Netherlands), but that doesn't entitle me to say any particular world view _must_ be the good one. I for one, certainly miss the cultural openness, family bonds imposed on one by the typical South Indian society. I miss the attitude of "how do we get by and do this? no point in complaining that the government is failing to do blah, or relying on the safety net of a social system" - weird, I know. But, it gives you a certain mindset to look at things differently. I see this in my daily life with my Austrian wife and my son born in Denmark and being raised in The Netherlands - we(including myself) expect things to be in certain place, and feel entitled to them that we almost do not care. Look up the energy use and water use per capita in any western country versus that of India's and you'll see the eye-opening difference. India simply cannot afford to be as wasteful as the Americans or Europeans when the world is already lit on fire. Sure, western societies do not have underpaid home maids and servants, but the society here has been developing for a long time, and haven't had the misfortune of another country colonising them right during the industrial age and loot all of the resources and treating people like underpaid home maids and servants. Neither did they have the constraints of a warming climate dictating what or how much fossil fuel to burn to build out their infrastructure. India is huge, it has a different set of problems than the ones encountered by the western countries while they were developing. Over time, things will rationalise and I'm optimistic that the society will move towards the same priorities that the West has. But, I already cherish the secular credentials, diversity, innovation, and hard working populace of India. The scale of elections that occur that lead up to the election of the prime minister is a marvel to observe. I was only surprised to see the creme of the labour force(IT, one I happen to know) is already on par with the West that already seem to have it all. The rest will follow.