From His Mother’s Womb Untimely Ripp’d

June 9, 2008

While I’m in favour of Indian newspapers doing more feature stories that go more in-depth than five hundred words and two soundbites, this Mint article on Caesarean sections is not the way to go. It’s poorly researched, inconclusive, meanders all over the place, and does too much New York Times level balancing of opposing opinions, even when the opposing opinions don’t necessarily have equal relevance or weight.

I am an MBA and not an MBBS. Also, I am unlikely to ever receive a C-section (though the possibility can never be ruled out). As both a producer and consumer of C-sections, I lack experience and expertise. However:

  1. I am a smartarse who likes to call out wonky reasoning even when I know nothing about the underlying facts the reasoning is built on.
  2. I also have a personal interest in infants as sacrifices to Elder Gods and a food source.
  3. I was in Section C in IIMB and I feel this obliges me to defend all C-sections. In fact, Kodhi and me wanted to use ‘I was reborn by C Section’ as the class tshirt slogan but Bubbly shot down the idea because she thought it was too gross.
  4. Defending C-sections has the added advantage that it may piss off the Mad Momma.

Right. So here we go. First, the article. As I alluded above, it’s mostly a collection of sound-bites without any solid analysis, and so doesn’t really qualify as good feature journalism. It takes quotes from every possible party concerned, and doesn’t develop any of them. But such is life.

Then there’s confusing correlation and causation:

The burst in numbers is also inextricably linked with the advent of “corporatized” private health care in India.
Birth is big business; delivery rates vary from city to city, but a large private hospital in Delhi can earn up to Rs70,000-80,000 for a Caesarean package (including room and OT charges), whereas a normal delivery package brings in around Rs44,000, according to numbers collected by a team of doctors at Sitaram Bhartia hospital.

Yes, fine, but a Caesarean delivery would cost more than a normal delivery even at a non-corporatised hospital or clinic. The rise of corporatized health care is due to rising affluence and a preference for reliability. The preference for C-sections is also due to rising influence, as the article itself points out:

Urban Indian women are now marrying later, conceiving later in life, and having fewer children. Every child is so precious that parents are averse to taking any risk and are increasingly viewing the Caesarean as a reliable option.

…

Rather, the growth in C-section numbers, he says, is better explained by changing urban lifestyles, busy obstetrician schedules and the convenience of planned procedures. “Many women try to schedule Caesarean procedures on special days such as birthdays or festivals,” says Barua. On some of these days, women line up for Caesareans,” he adds.

Just because affluence leads to corporate health service, and affluence also leads to a preference for C-sections, doesn’t mean corporate health service leads to C-sections. Or vice versa.

OK, but what about the actual medical risks? Those are important too, right? Well, here the article goes into this, that, but on the other hand again:

There is no denying the fact that Caesarean sections routinely save lives. In the event of certain serious pregnancy-related complications, the surgery can be a mother or baby’s only hope. At least two studies have also shown that scheduled or “elective” C-sections—as opposed to an “emergency” Caesarean section in which a mother or child is already in distress—may even be safer than vaginal deliveries. Some scientists also argue that the procedure can help reduce the risk of problems such as incontinence in later life.

…

Research, however, challenges these claims, and throws light on the problems that can complicate a surgical birth. Bleeding can be severe and the surgical wound can get infected. Recovery time is weeks longer and more painful. And, after one C-section, a mother faces serious risks during her next delivery, including the chances of uterine rupture or her new baby’s placenta attaching itself to her scar.

So what we have here is a choice of risks, yes? When the mother is in distress, it’s not really a difficult decision – the risk of infection, and of not being able to control bleeding is much more easily dealt with than the risk of something far more complicated like upside-down breech babies (mentioned earlier in the article). But yep, what about next delivery risks? This study conducted in South Australia mentions them. It measures what the odds of particular illnesses or complications in a mother’s second birth are, when the first birth is a C-section. 95% of the time, the increased risk compared to a normal birth are:

  • Head not coming out first: 65% to 106% more likely
  • Placenta previa: 30% to 111% more likely
  • Hemorrhaging: 8% to 41% more likely
  • Placenta accreta: 2.28 to 864 times more likely
  • Prolonged labour: 3.91 to 8.89 times more likely
  • Low birth weight: 14% to 48% more likely
  • Emergency C-section: 8.98 to 9.67 times more likely

Which sounds scary, except for two things. First, the study itself makes a disclaimer: Cesarean delivery is associated with increased risks for adverse obstetric and perinatal outcomes in the subsequent birth. However, some risks may be due to confounding factors related to the indication for the first cesarean. In other words, the first C-section may have been caused by medical factors which also led to increased risks in the second birth. Secondly, the risks are already small: placenta accreta occurs once in every 2500 births. Even if the chance of placenta accreta goes up a 100 times, it’ll only happen 4% of the time. Not vanishingly small odds, but small enough that you can trade-off the increased risks with the comfort and security of a C-section the first time.

What about the study the article mentions? The one about increased risk of respiratory problems?

In a study reported last December in the British Medical Journal, researchers studied 34,458 live births in Denmark—of these, 2,687 were elective Caesareans—and found that C-section babies were up to four times more likely to have respiratory problems.

Here’s a link to the study in question. Elective C-section babies are four times more likely to have respiratory problems. However, when you break down the odds by when the C-section happens – it turns out that while the odds are even higher than four times if the C-section is early – when the C-section happens in the same week the natural birth would have; there is no significant difference in the risks. The study is not an argument against C-sections, but against scheduling early C-sections – which is very sensible.

What really makes me angry in the article is this quote:

“We’ve come to believe that C-sections are safe but it’s an urban myth,” says Ruth Malik, 38, who co-founded Birth India, a natural childbirth advocacy group in Mumbai, last year, after having gone through two Caesarean procedures she now believes weren’t necessary. Ruth, who recently filed a suit against her doctor in Mumbai, says: “Birth is not an illness. We don’t need a surgeon to help us have babies. It’s a natural function, it’s something our bodies simply know how to do.”

OK, safe C-sections being an urban myth is something that makes me want to scream out ‘citation needed’. Safe in what context? How safe or unsafe? Natural birth isn’t 100% safe and neither are C-sections. The question is, are they safe enough? For negligibly less safety, is a lot more convenience worth it? Why not let the mother decide?

The scary thing about the ‘nature never intended this!’ argument against C-sections is that it can go down a slippery slope. If you argue against C-sections because they were never intended by nature, you can also argue against abortions. Or pacemakers or kidney dialysis. In fact, to contact lenses and spectacles.

Readers (especially Ritwik, probably) will now rush in to point out that the slippery slope argument is absurd. There is a ‘yuck’ factor about abdominal incisions that is not there in spectacles. And pacemakers are lifesaving devices while elective C-sections are largely about convenience.

So what? Cosmetic surgery is about convenience and not lifesaving, but there are no advocacy groups against it. So is LASIK surgery for that matter. And what about ear piercing and tattooing? Those are invasive body modifications which are not necessary at all, and also come with risks of infection, but nobody sensible argues against them on the grounds that they’re unnatural. (For more comprehensive and better written articles about biological enhancement, naturalism, and dignity, read this and this)

Yes, it is sensible to make informed choices about whatever you do – take out a home loan, go driving instead of taking a bus, or getting a C-section instead of a natural delivery. But this should be based on the risks to you personally, not vague platitudes about whether it was intended by nature or not. We can trust mothers to make the right decision about whether C-sections suit them or not, without bringing in conspiracy theories about corporate healthcare, or whether caesarean sections are ‘natural’ or not.

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Lines of the Day

May 17, 2008

I have a daughter. I will not be allowing her anywhere where restrictions are placed on her during her periods.

(The Brat, the Bean and Bedlam)

Indeed! Why let society, sisters-in-law, or mothers-in-law restrict where you go or don’t go when it’s so much more efficient to let your mother do it for you?

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Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice

February 16, 2008

Amit has blogged about the Saudi Arabian ban on red roses here:

The decision has been taken by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which sounds like something right out of Kafka.

There’s also a CNN story on this, which contains these priceless quotes:

Ahmed Al-Omran, a university student in Riyadh, told CNN that the government decision will give the international media another reason to make fun of the Saudis “but I think that we got used to that by now.”

…

Because of the ban on red roses, a black market has flowered ahead of Valentine’s Day. Roses that normally go for five Saudi riyal ($1.30) fetch up to 30 riyal ($8) on February 14, the Saudi Gazette said.

“Sometimes we deliver the bouquets in the middle of the night or early morning, to avoid suspicion,” one florist told the paper.

Anyway. As evil organisations which nevertheless have really cool names go, the Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (according to Wikipedia, a more accurate translation is Committee for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) is right up there on both counts, scoring high on both evil activities and cool names.

Kodhi and me have concluded that the reason the name is so cool is that it contains not only the base objective (i.e., Promotion of Virtue) but also the negation of the opposite (i.e., Prevention of Vice). You could similarly make a fixed deposit sound cool by calling it an Instrument for the Encouragement of Savings and Discouragement of Consumption; or mobile phone silent mode sound cool by calling it the Mode for Preservation of Sanity and Reduction of Stress. We have also decided that our sitcom must contain either an organisation named on this principle, or constant Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice references.

The MPVPV also scores high on the being evil front. In addition to banning all things red, it has also banned cats and dogs, as pets are a Western influence and thus nothing to do with Islam:

“One bad habit spreading among our youths is the acquisition of dogs and showing them off in the streets and malls,” wrote Aleetha al-Jihani in a letter to Al-Madina newspaper. “There’s no doubt that such a matter makes one shudder.”

“Then what’s the point of dragging a dog behind you?” he added. “This is blind emulation of the infidels.”

It also beats up Catholic priests, junta who put daaru, and women found talking to men.

However, it’s greatest hit ever was in 2004, when it stopped firefighters from pulling girls out of a burning school building because – wait for this – they were not in burkhas and pulling them out would have incited lust in the firefighters. 14 girls died. The ‘BBC’ says:

According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.

One witness said he saw three policemen “beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya”.

The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police – known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned “it is a sinful to approach them”.

Depressing as it is that in India we have to deal with nutjobs like the Hindu Makkal Katchi and Syed Imam Bukahri, we can at least take solace in the fact that we don’t have a Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Holding Saudi Arabia as a benchmark is slightly unambitious, but it’s a start.

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Infy Public School

December 12, 2007

Raiders Lost the Arc, the idiotically titled and idiotically written Outlook cover story on how IT is ruining Bangalore, has been debunked and fisked enough elsewhere on the blogosphere (Churumuri rebuts CNR Rao here, Nitin points out what the Outlook story missed here). Sugata Srinivasraju doesn’t ever blame IT junta for ruining infrastructure himself, but he conveniently forgets that infrastructure is the government’s responsibility, not the IT industry’s. When developers try to make infrastructure their own responsibility, as in the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor, the government has gone after them with a hatchet.

However, it’s undeniable that there is an influx of immigrants into Bangalore (me included), and that this is leading to new cultural forms (which still does not translate to a destruction of the old culture and values of the city).  But there’s something interesting about this wave of migration.

Uptil now, whenever there’s been internal migration in India, the migrants have alsways carried their culture along with them and ghettoised themselves. So Gujrati Jains and Marwaris used to set up their own schools and colleges wherever they went. Mumbai has DG Ruparel College and lots of other Gujew colleges (which are mocked regularly in JAM), and even more Gujrati dominated schools. Even Bangalore has a Gujrati medium school near City Market. Other communities don’t migrate as prodigiously as the Gujratis and Marwaris, but they still cluster. So you have Bongs coalescing in Chittaranjan Park in Delhi, Punjews sending their kids to DAV schools all across UP, and Tams setting up Sangam associations in Delhi and Mumbai. And this is before they extend the ghettoization by marrying somebody from the homelands.

But the IT migration to Bangalore (and Pune and other hotspots) is different. The migrants are united by profession, not by community. And while within the overall migrant community they’ll still form sub-clusters based on language and community affiliations, the ghettoisation is not as extreme as it was when Marwari traders flocked to Chikpet and created their own temples and schools there.

So what I’m eagerly waiting to see is what happens when the IT professionals’ kids go to school – and where they go to school. If migrants’ kids and ‘old-Bangaloreans” kids grow up together, the clash of cultures is probably not going to be as acute.

This could of course go all pear shaped if:

  1. New schools don’t come up fast enough to cater to the Bengalooru baby boomlet – this worries me the most.
  2. New schools which do come up price themselves out of reach of the old middle class. Even so, if they do, they’ll price themselves out of reach of a substantial number of IT workers as well, so cultural intermingling would still happen, just in old, cheap schools instead of new, expensive ones. I somewhat doubt this will happen. This is India. People will find the money to educate their kids.
  3. Cultural factors mean schools end up as IT/ non-IT kids ghettos also. I greatly doubt this will happen. Schools compete for students, just as students compete for schools. If the kid is smart, the school isn’t going to care about the parents (at least at the post Class-10 level). And if the school is really good, the parents aren’t going to care much about who the other parents are.

How this plays out is going to be interesting.

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Traditional and Conservative

November 22, 2007

One of the disadvantages of making a quiz is that the people who’ll attend my quiz tend to also read my blog. So, you can’t link to really awesome stuff you find because it’ll tip them off to your questions, or at least the source of your questions.

One such awesome thing which I can reveal now that the quiz is done is a blog called Round Dice. There’re very few posts, and the author stopped blogging altogether this February, but all the posts there are most awesome.

Posts from this blog which eventually became questions include one on kolams, one on the tribhanga pose, and one on Bhaskaracharya’s Lilavati. The tribhanga post is especially awesome, because it manages to link Chalukya sculpture to structural engineering, the Vitruvian man, and Anna Nicole Smith. Read.

There was also one post which didn’t really have any question-worthy funda, but which I particularly liked. It’s on the difference between being traditional and being conservative:

As I see it, a traditionalist is someone who uses the past in his/her daily life. For a traditionalist, the past is neither dead nor inaccessible. If a particular tradition no longer works —  slavery or foot-binding or burning widows —  it is modified to make a new tradition. The modification is usually a series of minor changes: a sari may be exchanged for a salwar, a particular dish may no longer be cooked, a man may go to Lamaze class, a Bollywood movie may include a gay character, etc. 

In contrast, a conservative’s relationship is not with the past, but with the future. The conservative does not love the past as much as he fears the future. The Shiv Sainiks flip out on Valentine’s day not because Urvashi never sent a “I heart you” to Pururava (she did), but because their version of the future only permits docile women. The actual past is quite irrelevant for a conservative.

Beautifully put.

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I Want to be a Cultural Nationalist

September 25, 2007

(I’m posting this now, because I have to rush for work. I’m not too satisfied with how the post is written, though, so I’ll probably continue to edit and update it over the day/ week. Your comments will be welcome, as always.)

More than three years ago, Ravikiran inserted these lines into a blogpost about why Sonia shouldn’t be PM:

But nationalism isn’t discovered, it is constructed. Every generation finds things we have in common, things that we share, things that we value and things that we can be proud of, and builds a nationalism out of it. Just because it is constructed it doesn’t mean that it isn’t real.

…

When I say that “X” is something we share it doesn’t mean that every Indian shares “X” and that anyone who doesn’t appreciate “X” isn’t an Indian. But I am saying that many Indians share it, and X, Y and Z together defines Indianness.

These were practically throwaway lines, but they somehow packed more punch than the rest of the blogpost. The insight here is utterly stunning.

But why am I bringing up a three year old blogpost? Because it offers answers to questions raised in a three month old blogpost! This one on The Acorn, where Nitin asks what India is fighting for, besides territory and people:

Nationalism was given a nasty connotation decades ago, and going by its general portrayal in the international media, even patriotism is somehow suspect (except, that is, if you are in America). Yet without a sense of patriotism, a sense of shared values worth defending, it is hard to see how plural democratic societies can prevail over totalitarian ideologies.

And now, I’ll bring in a third angle, from Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail (read more about it at the Wikipedia entry, or the official site), which says:

The same Long Tail forces that are leading to an explosion of variety and and abundant choice in the content we consume are also tending to lead us into tribal eddies. When mass culture breaks apart, it doesn’t re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of microcultures, which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.

As a result, we can now treat culture as not one big blanket, but as the superposition of many interwoven threads, each of which is individually addressable and connects different groups of people simultaneously.

In short, we’re seeing a shift from mass culture to massively parallel culture. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping (geek culture and LEGO), often not (tennis and punk-funk). We share some interests with out colleagues and some with our families, but not all of our interests. Increasingly, we have other people to share them with, people we have never met or even think of as individuals (e.g., blog authors or playlist creators).

Now, obviously Long Tail forces are going to operate much slower in India than they are in the United States. But when they do, two things are going to happen:

  1. Any attempt to define India or Indianness through One Grand Idea is going to be even more doomed to failure. This holds for attempts to impose Hindi on the rest of the country, or trying to push a top-down version of Hindutva as the BJP once tried, or to go the 1980s Doordarshan route and aim for National Integration through Repeated Airplay of Bharat Bala videos.
    (I’d also like to point out here that an idea of cultural nationalism based on One Grand Idea is untenable even now. If your idea of India is based on commonality of culture, then Akhand Bharat in’t just desirable, it’s a moral imperative. And it would have to incorporate not just Pakistan and Nepal and Bangladesh, but everything up to Indochina and Bali and even Jackson Heights and Southall.)
  2. But paradoxically, national integration will actually improve as Indians create new cultural touchpoints which will be shared across geography and demographics. A hundred years ago, a Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya novel had no audience outside literate Bengalis. Now, YouTube allows a music enthusiast from Bangalore to see Bangla rock videos; online forums allow geeks sitting in Madras and Ludhiana to help each other out with Perl problems, and blogs make it possible for a TDC to appreciate humour grounded in Tamil culture. Common cultures will be created faster, except that the creation will be messy and undirected and emergent, and quite probably the despair of the eighty-year olds in political parties and the Sangh Parivar.

What’s going to make things even messier is that these new shared cultures could very easily spring up across national borders. So Indians and Pakistanis could have even more of a shared culture, while India and Pakistan continue to be antithetical ideas and antagonistic states. Which brings us to the real point of this post: how the hell do you create and spread an idea that transforms the nature of the state? How do you infuse the Indian government with the idea that it’s meant to empower its citizens, not dictate to them, and how do you change the mindset of the Pakistani state to worrying about the growth of Pakistan, not the liberation of Kashmir or the quelling of India?

That is probably going to require creating institutions like think tanks and political parties and liberal newspapers,  which is going to be much more painful and complicated than people in different states bonding over the same YouTube video. The costs of creating such institutions is probably much less today then it was ten years ago, but how to drive the costs down – and create more incentives for doing so – is an open question, and one which I’ll hopefully write more about in the near future.

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Vinayak Chaturthi

September 15, 2007

It’s Vinayak Chaturthi today, and I’m slightly regretting not being in Bombay.  A year ago, I saw a Bombay Vinayak Chaturthi for the first time, and I was absolutely blown over by it.

Out of all the festivals I’ve seen in India, nothing manages to be one big, cooperative street party the way Vinayak Chaturthi does in Bombay. Diwali in Delhi is pretty much every family against every other family in the firecrackers stakes, Baisakhi in Patiala is a community festival only for the kids, and all the festivals in Bangalore seem to be intensely private family affairs.

(Incidentally, this ties up with my theory of how public space is shared in Bombay, fought over in Delhi, and respected or at least treated with indifference in Bangalore. But that’s another post.)

The biggest culture shock to a Delhiite seeing the Vinayak Chaturthi celebrations in Bombay is the trucks. In Delhi, trucks on a festival day are associated with rowdies from UP crossing the border on Holi to rape and pillage. In Bombay, trucks are filled with happy middle class families who’re dancing and generally having a blast without making a nuisance of themselves. (Well, except for the noise.)

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s (somebody else’s) photos on the festival: Link, and link.

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Reckless Stereotyping

September 13, 2007

Marwaris become wholesale traders. Of steel. Or generic pharmaceuticals or cement or pretty much any commodity. Send their kids to a local Maadoo school and then a local Maadoo B. Com. college. The sons join the family business. The daughters are married off. The family’s black money goes as dowry and becomes an unsecured loan to the son-in-law’s family business. Which also trades the same commodity.

Punjabis set up garment export units. Send the sons to do a BBA in Australia. Send the daughters to NIFT. Both come back and run the family business. Then the daughter gets married and sets up her own business with her sister-in-law. The daughter’s family provides more seed capital than the sister-in-law’s.

So it goes.

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Design for Servants

August 22, 2007

I have been thinking recently about how so many Indian household products and housework processes are badly designed. I am not talking about brands but entire product categories. Examples of badly designed products include beds which are difficult to move (not so common these days as twenty years ago), wire netting window covers which collect dust, mixies which are too noisy (especially if you compare a desi brand like Sumeet or Jaipan with a Philips or Morphy Richards), and entire houses which are badly laid out (I will elaborate on this later).Also, products which are well-designed and replace bad ways of doing things are not popular at all. In my building of sixteen flats, mine is the only one with an ironing board. Also, everyone hangs their laundry out on the balcony. Nobody uses a clotheshorse. (I myself am to blame in this respect, but only because I haven’t bought one yet. I’m planning to do it next month.) This is stupid for two reasons: first, Bangalore has a rainy climate, and drying your clothes outside could just mean that they get wet again. Second, a bird can come and crap on your laundry after you’ve washed it, wasting all the effort that went into washing it in the first place (yes, I’m bitter, so sue me).

The slow way in which well designed products are adopted is astonishing. Washing machine penetration is abysmal as it is. But even when there are washing machines, top-loading washing machines outsell front-loading machines. After ten years of frost-free technology, manual defrost refrigerators are still on the market even though the price difference is just about five thousand rupees. This makes a total mockery of motivational sales lectures about how price is irrelevant if you can offer a customer value.

So why isn’t the customer looking for value in design? I think the answer lies in domestic servants. The Indian servant culture (stretching from visiting bais to stay-at-home cooks) means that the person who buys the product (the householder) is completely different from the person who uses the product (the servant). Since the buyer is not going to use the product, he sees no value in usability, and so always chases value in terms of price reductions instead. This can have horrible consequences for the person who has to use the badly designed product.

Example one: mopping. If we’re the ones wet-cleaning our floors, we go out and buy a mop. As long as the maid is around, we expect her to do it with a pochha, her back bent at a completely uncomfortable angle. The extra price you pay to avoid that uncomfortable posture is only a hundred and twenty rupees, but the cost-benefit ratio doesn’t even enter your head until it’s you who has to bear the cost and benefit.

Example two: kitchens. Specifically, my kitchen. It is this kitchen which has got me so worked up about the whole subject and left me convinced that designing for servants is the reason usability in India is so crap. The problems with this kitchen include:

  1. It is too small. This makes ventilation a problem even with an exhaust fan. It also means ingredients and utensils have to be densely stacked. So to access one thing, you have to first remove five other things (and then put them back). It also makes cleaning it difficult.
  2. The cupboards have no shelves. There are no nails from which to hang utensils or utensil racks. Again, this causes problems when you need to move five things to get to the one thing you’re looking for.
  3. There are not enough power points for appliances. There isn’t enough shelf space or floor space for appliances for that matter. The floor space is all taken up by the master bedroom (which my flatmate only uses to sleep in), and the hall (which isn’t used at all).

This is a problem for me because when I’m fixing breakfast in the morning I want to do it as soon as possible so I can get to work. At that time having to remove three different plates and bartans to get to a frying pan is completely annoying. Of course, the person who designed the kitchen was doing it for a bai whose time was much less valuable, and so the cupboards have no shelves.

Unfortunately, the situation will not change until any of these four things happens:

  1. People realize that their domestic servants are human beings, and stop expecting them to do stuff that they wouldn’t do themselves. Ha ha ha. Good luck trying to change the attitude of three hundred million people.
  2. The government or industry associations step in and set minimum usability standards. Ha ha ha. Good luck trying to enforce the standards.
  3. Domestic help moves from a servant model to a service provider model, where servants are professionals who are hired and paid well by the hour. Ha ha ha. Good luck trying to set up a professional and premium maid service in India when there are half a billion Biharis, Bangladeshis, and Nepalians who’ll happily work for peanuts.
  4. More people start doing their own housework and start relying less on domestic help, and so start demanding better designed household appliances. This, I am actually optimistic about. Domestic help can be a value-destroyer in many cases: supervising servants takes up time, which you might as well use to do the work yourself. If there’s no grandmother/ jobless wife around to supervise the servant, the cost-benefit changes (which is why I’ve sacked my cook).

This post could lead to many other topics, such as why there are no ten-litre packs of juice in India, and why Praful Bidwai is an idiot, but I have no time to write them. So I’ll end it here.

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Diversity and Inclusion

July 8, 2007

My employers, bless them, are great believers in Diversity and Inclusion. At the global level, they want to make the organisation as diverse as possible on three parameters: gender, nationality, and physical handicap.

In India, the country office decided to focus on gender diversity. Increasing the number of nationalities in India is complex because of visa issues (not to mention that most people of other nationalities would rather not work here), and including physically handicapped people in the organisation requires large investments in infrastructural changes. Bringing women in and making them feel more comfortable is comparatively low hanging fruit.

Except that it screws up diversity on other dimensions, which aren’t being measured.

The thing is, women from smaller towns are much less likely to have the qualifications a woman from a metro does. More to the point, societal norms will act as a barrier to women migrating to metros and taking up jobs there even if they have qualifications. So increasing the gender mix and getting more women into the workplace will actually end up throttling geographical diversity or diversity of personal background.

This isn’t a huge problem if you think gender diversity is far more important than any sort (there are good arguments both for and against such a presumption), but it just illustrates that diversity as an end in itself can end up being self-defeating.

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