Human, Lumpen, Bullies, and Politics of Envy

Human, Lumpen, Bullies, and Politics of Envy

When we were students aspiring to be academic scholars, life wasn't a rose petals world - we lived on hope and for the glory that is discovery of truth, of expanding horizons of knowledge and more. For this privilege we were thankful enough to do half a teaching load (compared to full faculty members) for an annual stipend less than salary per month of what a babysitter today is supposed to be paid, on an average, and we paid whatever exorbitant rent locally decided by the markets unlike the said babysitter today whose rent and food and other bills are expected to be paid by the employer. We paid our bills, our taxes, our social security, and had but little protection of health insurance generally, unlike the privileged babysitter.

Our work, real work, however, was not teaching; teaching was merely how we were allowed to survive. Our work was the never-ending search for the rainbow, the science and the discovery, our research, our thesis. This had no timetable but our life, no schedule but twenty four hours a day all days of year, and more, while we were expected and measured on other aspects of life as well – awareness of fine arts, social skills, expertise with cuisines of the world – informally. And we attempted to measure up, if only because it was all for a dream we had all dreamt for ourselves.  

A few went off their sanity, some committed suicides, and no one – least of all us, most of us anyway – would penalise any part of the chain in our survival, any employers direct or otherwise, anyone who sent bills that we had to manage to pay – unlike the privileged babysitter in NY whose bills, food and rent and all else but what she sent her family back halfway around the world, were paid by her employers, on her salary well over ten times what we were paid. We cooked, kept our homes clean, paid for our heating and hot water (if you think that is a joke you have not lived in colder parts of the world, colder than NY), and electricity and phone and transport. Unlike the privileged babysitter of Devayani whose bills were paid by her employer, along with the ten times our salary that she was paid.

Yes, prices have gone up – but not that far, and if she is expected to be paid a stipend well over three times what we got after adjusting for inflation and years since, apart from all her expenses as well, there is something wrong with a country that expects uneducated labour to be paid better than would be faculty of universities of their own, and the envy of India so rampant in US for India’s intellectual and scientific cadre in spite of much pulicised poverty – and tolerance or prevalence of faiths other than approved by Rome – seems a clear fraud.

We did not go about incriminating our employer even in our thoughts, much less in action – as this maid did, hiring (or being used by) a firm that specializes in accusing employers of human trafficking with a conspiracy that went from NYPD to US embassy in India to perhaps Rome, who knows where! If an odd doctoral candidate shot his advisor for making him work for twenty years and still was not satisfied enough, we had merely a silent sympathy, and never spoke of it. We had a dream and toiled hard to climb towards the summit of our beginning of a life we had chosen – scientific research.

And when we arrived there at the end of our rainbow to take a place on a faculty somewhere (if we were lucky enough), we still got less than half the said babysitter of today whose employer is penalised in a shameful way for paying her – the employee – what her compatriots back home would consider a salary enough for ten such workers, for the same work, and with no other bills paid (food, rent, or anything else) along with the salary either.

Other colleagues were less happily placed – my housemate was in music and was paid only half what we were, so she worked a bank job half a day as well, apart from all other grueling work. Not that it was music to blame. IT employees today get one tenth of their coworkers depending on which part of earth they happen to work in, for the same work. And if someone is working in a richer nation with higher bills to pay but hails from a poor nation, the poor sap is paid a pittance in addition to his salary back home for the duration of his stay – could be weeks, months, years, indefinite – unless he cuts loose and gets himself a local employee with a different contract, and a legal status changed from worker imported to worker local.

What does not, ever, happen is hauling any of the huge IT firms into court for human trafficking, much less handcuffing them on crowded roads before their children at their schools, or strip searching them in jail and locking them up with drug abusers and sex workers. The IT firms are doing nicely, thank you.

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Or is it so simple, as glory to menial jobs and workers doing them while down with education and those that aspire to life of intellect and more? Not that anyone can deny racism in paying pittance to workers from poor countries even when they are brought to rich lands to pay hefty bills, or paying exhorbitant salaries (including huge rents for their living arrangements – one European brought to work on an airline in a third world country was arranged to live in a five star hotel for over a year, and he was not a CEO or anything comparable, only a man who dealt with keeping the planes in their nuts and bolts; granted this is important, but is it less so when done in a first world country, and if so is he kept in the same luxury of a five star hotel when he works in one of those places? NO!!!). Is it simple racism?

NO, as a matter of fact. It is also misogyny, and it takes only a moment to look at the whole picture. The real sin, crime et al that Devayani Khobragade committed was to be a woman, and compounded it then by being educated, highly placed official with authority of her position in a first world nation that does not really approve of it no matter what lip service it gives, and then of course there are her other sins – being not only non-“white” but also of a different “faith”.

Of course she had to be handcuffed in street before her children and their school, and strip searched in jail before being locked up with streetwalkers and drug addicts of New York. She is a Hindu from India and was not a slumdog, was a deputy counsel for her consulate.

How dare she!

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For fact is, she is neither alone nor singled out, as a woman from another faith, another country – one they prefer to see not as an emerging IT savvy or even one with a rich culture intellectually and spiritually, and in the latter far more so then their own roots could aspire to go, but as “slumdog” that must be shamed in a culture of a rich nation that worships bullies in school and jocks in general, demeans women into sex objects and worse, and more. Intellectuals are abused at school as geeks or nerds, persecuted, and expected to not survive youth unless protected by a bully jock; when they do so survive, they are roundly abused for not being more busy with hundreds of women than with their intellectual concerns, unless they use those concerns to make tons of money in law or medicine. Elsewhere these professions are seen as noble in helping humanity, not in the new world. There, law and medicine are only short of running a chain of supermarkets in terms of making money.

Devayani is not singled out or alone in being punished for being a woman who does not choose between family and career, much less between family and education. Any woman who tried to have both would be punished, and socially before law takes over as in case of Devayani. You only have to look at the social structure, the right wing screaming against women for expecting to be counted as humans on par with their male lords and masters – lords and masters as a caste, mind you, due to gender and not due to any particular reason of a relationship even.

A male (of course!) colleague once chastised me for attempting to care for a very sick mother, while I carried out any duties necessitated by the position of being on faculty in a university – I did not skip lectures or appointments, but his logic was faculty ought to be present nine to five like any clerical or menial staff, although it was obvious to everyone they were spending the whole time between reading newspaper, gossiping, or shouting at office boys to fetch coffee (this last was only affordable to someone known to be politically well connected).

I asked him what he would do in a similar position; he very arrogantly proclaimed “I would never be in such a position” – I am not joking. I refrained from asking specific questions, such as how he could control his own self or family to the extent he could guarantee no one would ever be ill, bedridden or paralysed. But the answer was obvious really – his gender was the root of his arrogant and stupid proclamation. Yes, people including his children could be bedridden, paralysed, whatever – it was never going to be his problem. He would simply demand his wife does needful and if she was bedridden he would marry another one to solve that problem.

But since I was, am, the “wrong” gender, he felt entitled to be rude, and demand and dictate terms in ways that would be unreasonable on any other count. What is more a female colleague too remarked much later that she had thought I should have waited for a tenured position before indulging in caring for a dying parent, and she only knew better when in a few months it was over, realizing death waits for no one. Then she said, perhaps I had known better all along, after all.

And this was not the place where I was the first woman on faculty, either – that was before this, in a place where I was alone, living alone and knew no one. So the jocks complained for getting lesser grade than their girlfriends (didn’t occur to them to check if the girlfriend did do better in fact, and deserved it, which in this case she did) and “white” students were unhappy about others doing better (again, for the same reason). Female students told me of the relief they found in being treated as a student to be considered in respect of their intellectual performance, and not as a girl to be never allowed to answer no matter they know better than the guys called on to do so, like others on faculty did to them.

And then one of them – a bright one at that – went on to question an objective rather than subjective grading by hinting copiously at a loner life, and directly gossiping to say publicly that her low grade was due to my being alone (in case this is unclear, it did not refer to friends or family, only to her living with a man while I was not even meeting one). And the brightest of them fell to the beehive and took the bait offered, to go against and switch classes, and I am sure far worse (she is doing well partly as a reward, while word going around kept me from possible offers next).

Was I the first or the only person on the faculty ever to grade objectively? No, there had been someone before me who did that, but he was not only a male, he was also “white”, albeit from halfway around the world as I was. So he had to leave but was able to find another place, and was probably free of gossip of the vicious sort about his social or personal life. His departure was definite when he had decided to teach from a standard text rather than an awful one written by a member of the faculty, and subsequently I had made the same decision, resulting in losing the class and the job after being promised a continuance.

A woman colleague once explained that she chose to live an academic life and therefore sacrificed any thought of a life that would include a family. This would be incomprehensible to anyone in India. Women routinely do both in India, not because they are superwomen compared to those from the “first world” but because they are not penalized for this. Some for necessity of supporting a family, giving one’s children just that much more; some because they are well qualified and can do more, and are not seen as villains or vamps for employing a worker or half a dozen for taking over the menial tasks and paying them what the neighbours do to their workers. Market determines the deal.

And some do, yes, have aspirations beyond the usual concern for making a bit to pay for one’s children’s future. Some aspire to academics, others to music or medicine or even being founders or CEOs of inventive scientific corporations – they all manage home and family as well, with help from everyone around. Family is defined in more extensive sense and grandparents are on hand to be part of grandchildren’s life everyday as a matter of course, unlike US where they might have to sue for visitation rights. Family, relatives, neighbours, employees, every possible venue of help is available to women who would rather not limit themselves to housework.

And they are not penalised for this, unless a member of the family is envious – even then, it is nothing to speak of out of ordinary, certainly nothing comparable to what Devayani was made to go through in NY, only because she was a woman from India who had not only education and a career and a high position of authority, but dared to do so in spite of having children, and worse – for not keeping those children away from her back home. Or in a residential school in Switzerland, like a more sensible parent would, instead of in US, much less in New York. How dare she wish to keep them and have demanding career too!

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Most embassies, consulates and so forth around the world are populated with men in positions other than typists, or glorified (or not so much) secretaries – and some use men for those positions too. Most therefore have families with them only if they have wives, and most have a network of male bonding that prevents them from being arrested for employing a chauffeur, a cook, a housecleaner, or any other home worker. The wife is their primary unpaid employee, like any other man in any position anywhere in the world. They are not arrested in the street before their children in front of their schools and thrown in jails with drug addicts and strip searched for sin of employing someone at home for a salary ten times that of any such worker back home, much less expected to pay salaries comparable to IT professionals to house workers. Most wives around the world do far more than babysitting and get paid nothing, although the argument about doing it for herself applies not at all when it comes to ownership which rests solely with the male parent.

Oh, never mind consulates and embassies and third world and different faiths and question of whether it was a powerful institution other than law that pushed for punishing Devayani for not being of the same faith as her maid. Just look at the accusation, “human trafficking”, and think over how many rich US male citizens are punished in any way – much less hand cuffed, paraded, strip searched et al – for employing house workers from central or southern part of the continent, illegal or underpaid or whatever.

The real salvation of those men that do so regularly are guilty of “human trafficking” far more than Devayani – because after all she employed someone from her own country, never dreaming this woman would turn on her for being of another faith and blackmail, extort and more, using her own faith and power tools thereof available to her but not to the employer – no, the central and south “American” employees of the rich US citizens have little in common with their own employers in terms of language, life experience, country of origin or level of economy back home.

The real clue? The wives of these men are, as a rule, not comparable to Devayani in education, career, personal achievement or position – on the contrary, they are likely to be trophy wives trying to keep their husbands’ attention by using every trick sold by cosmetics and fashion industry that has now medical and surgical factors as well, and doing little but partying and gossip besides.

Devayani paid for being not one of them. She is educated, managed a grueling set of examinations and more for her career, rose higher up and still had a family, in spite of being not only from India but a Hindu as well. She had to be punished. After all, she did not have a wife do it all for free for her, unlike all the others – all men in this world, to begin with – that do not get so punished. 

In another culture she would be stoned to death by public in public, and then it would be considered shocking in US and first world. But handcuffed, dragged by police in front of her children in front of their school, strip searched, locked up with NY streetwalkers and drug abusers, with no apology and criminal persecution hanging over her head – why, she got of practically scot free!

Get thee to a nunnery, or draw a veil over yourself, literally or in lipstick, because you are not approved of in “faiths” that rule the world outside India. 

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Devayani is far from the only person to employ a maid for housework, or for babysitting, even in US. For this, mainly, and for paying her maid from India an Indian salary (which is precisely what humongous IT firms including those originating from US and not owned by India expats do, for weeks and minths and years, to people they bring to work in IT from India into US or Europe). NY has defined this as human trafficking, and US is backing them. Out of embarrassment at their own behavior, likely – which is still unpunished and without any reparations to speak of, all told.

US was settled by Europeans that pushed and massacred the people who lived in that land, and called it “new world” and discovery, rather than invasion; the original occupiers are given a false name, “Indian”, never mind they had nothing to do with India; this falsehood is an embarrassment stoutly imposed on all world, and for the sin of existence India must pay, since the falsehood of original people of what is now called US being misnamed Indians is obvious until India is not obliterated or silenced for good about existence of India.

Human trafficking as in slavery was rampant from China to Judea to Africa to US until the civil war of 1861-1865 in US, which is when a dim idea that slavery is bad began to spread (India never had it, according to surprised visitors from China since antiquity). US still does have racism and has made no reparations to the descendents of erstwhile slaves albeit talks of that sort happen from time to time, chiefly because they simply cannot afford it. Could they make a partial gesture, yes; they don’t want to, because it will set a precedent and demands for full payment for work rendered might come forth, not to mention punitive damages for torture, inhuman treatment, separation of families, and of course rapes of slave women by masters and their “white” sons et al. So there is merely a silence as a policy.

And Devayani is strip searched for having brought a maid from india to US with and Indian rather than a US salary. Who is kidding whom? Has anyone paid a dime of US salary to any descendent of a slave trussed and shipped like a potato, brought to US and sold like an animal in a market in Virginia, used in US and babies of slaves sold off as per will of the masters?

For that matter – what about the Chinese workers brought with a contract and treated just as bad in all but name of slavery, expected to live in subhuman conditions and build the railroads and go back? US might have forgotten, and the “white” population might be ignorant of it all, but Chinese have not. Chinatowns across US are practically forbidden territory to local PDs, for the ferocity with which they guard their domains. Human trafficking rampant, but is unchecked for most part.

Devayani’s sin and crime was being an easy target, like her nation, India – unlike China, or mafia from various known other nations. Devayani’s maid had connections to US embassy in India, and to a firm in NY that uses blackmail and extortion to get green cards for people who will otherwise never qualify to get a visa to US much less a resident status. And the said ambassador and his compatriots could pronounce the name of the maid’s husband, unlike Devayani or anyone of her “faith”. So go ahead and skew fairness and justice.

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It is hard to think of a nation that did not use human trafficking as a policy during colonial era – in any part of the world where they needed workers who would not stay home, go away or complain. Workers from India were carried by shiploads to every part of British Empire to work in factories or fields or plantations or worse, to work as soldiers against locals to protect British rulers or traders. Other European nations with any overseas possessions to speak of were no better.

But hey, let us punish an educated woman of nonwhite race, wrong gender and faith, poor nation attempting to do well, and we can all go home feeling good about a strict and strong policy on “human trafficking”. To meals prepared by Mexican or Guatemalan aid for a pittance, likely as not. As long as the master of the house is “white”, and of not the wrong “faith”, never fear being caught for the crime Devayani is strip searched for.

Incidentally, did NYPD think she had humans hidden in crevices of her body, for trafficking or any other purposes? Or is it obvious to everyone else in the world that it was deliberate torture and humiliation for sin of being a woman of education in a position of authority in spite of being of the wrong race, colour, nation et al?

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Devayani is not the only person from India to suffer humiliation or worse in a first world nation. Murders of young science and engineering students in various first world nations from US to Australia have been rising, mostly due to the victims being from India and doing well academically nevertheless, unlike the lumpen entitled “white” who prefer to hone their skills of bullying and murder rather than “math”, preferring to be not geeks but terrors with guns or knives or simply fists and boots that can take care of any brilliant student from a nation lacking in bully culture.

But that simple solution – shot in head, knife in torso, punching and kicking and throwing them on train tracks with moments for a fast train to pass – is only for the aspiring young males from India. For a woman, and especially for one in a position of authority, a far more intricate web of conspiracy from NYPD to us embassy in India has to be designed, and a far worse humiliation for the poor woman and her nation, by strip searching her so she is naked forever in imagination of the world.

Then the perpetrator nation browbeats India about Vienna convention, never mind which clause of the said convention is supposed to justify the treatment imposed on a deputy consul from a poor country in US, in spite of her diplomatic status and the immunity it ought to have guaranteed from just such behavior from law.

No, they won’t back down, for it is serious they say. No, they won’t pay descendents of slaves of US, for it is out of question they say. No, they won’t give back land stolen post agreement after agreement from natives of their land, and they WILL take water and land from them if they so deem necessary, they say.

Bully and lumpen, envy cultured intellectuals much?

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