25-05-2025
Manu Joseph: This is why the flight attendant shouldn't be a genius
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 grace and elegance of professional models.
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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, 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 tedious professions with no prospects. It is a sign that India has progressed so much that the smartest, or simply 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 different sorts of dreary jobs, or maybe have even opted to do nothing, which is not a bad way to be.
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Until about 25 years ago, Indians went to a restaurant and just asked for 'coffee." Then the café-chain Barista opened. What a naive time it was for a cafe to be called 'Barista.' It's like a bar called 'Bar-Tender.' But it was all so new and swanky that most of us had to rehearse a bit before we said 'cappuccino" so that we were not shamed in front of the suave baristas who worked there.
I felt it then—that there was something wrong if the staff at a café seemed more refined and cool than a nation's general population. You may argue that this is exactly the case in a rich-world café today—they are manned by the hip. But that is because many baristas in, say, Europe or America are students making side-money; or they only look well-off as most people appear in a rich society. In any case, their skills are probably not rare.
In 2000, in India, Barista should not have been able to afford the sort of youngsters who agreed to work there. They did not last long. The call-centre revolution came, and many of them moved to that, and those who started serving coffee had quite a different social profile. 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.
Around then, I had a friend who could have chosen any field but became a flight attendant because it paid her the most among the paths she could have taken in the country.
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You can see this phenomenon at work in the Miss Universe or Miss World pageants. Generally, with some exceptions, beauty queens from rich countries are from modest backgrounds, while the women from poor countries are from socially advanced backgrounds, usually from the upper middle class or affluent strata of society.
This was one of the reasons behind the difference between Indian beauty queens like Sushmita Sen or Aishwarya Rai and many of their competitors. All that has changed now. It is not a surprise that Indian beauty pageant contestants today come from different socio-economic backgrounds.
As India grows richer, lower rungs of society get more opportunities, especially as the top strata move on to better things or do not wish to participate in some areas of work. Today, even personal wealth managers are not all that urbane anymore.
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You may argue that this is still a nation where thousands of graduates apply for menial government jobs. In September, about 40,000 graduates and 6,000 post-graduates applied 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 for affordable hiring.
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Meanwhile, some 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 a pittance. Then 'salons' opened, where young people who appeared affluent and were called 'hair stylists' did the job.
But it is not clear to me what the chic of India's middle-class are doing today. What professions have absorbed them? Those suave guys who used to make cappuccinos and those articulate flight attendants—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.
The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, 'Decoupled'.
