The English talk about the weather and we talk about our house-helps!
The real trouble is when we are babies we are naturally not expected to tie our shoe laces or go to the bathroom by ourselves. A little later we don’t know how to put on our school uniform by ourselves or have breakfast alone. In fact, we need assisted living throughout our lives.
So suddenly if you are posted to New York how does one manage? You harness an “aunt” who is actually dying to go with you and see the world and in turn continue to assist you in living. It’s our business right? Oh no suddenly the foreign country you live in can’t bear the thought that you can afford this help and they can’t and so all the rules come out and you even get arrested. As to the horrific all cavity search: I mean what can you stuff up your nose for example?
I remember a cousin taking a certain “Gracey aunty” to the US and paying her the princely sum of Rs. 1,000 (those days a young account executive like me earned Rs. 800). Gracey was happy, cousins were happy, and other visiting relatives were happier. Never mind the fact that at the time a full-time help would have been paid $1,000 which worked out to about Rs. 14,000 I think at the exchange rate then.
Anyway, Gracey aunty went underground and is probably still roaming around without papers but another relative swears that he got into a taxi in Los Angeles and saw a driver alarmingly like Gracey in a pant suit. So when he tried to engage her in conversation by asking “Aren’t you Gracey?” she replied, “Not allowed to speak to passengers.”
I have heard the same argument about hiring children as servants: the parents begged us to take them on and feed them. Okay, but why can’t we also send them to school? Or even hire a teacher to teach in the afternoons while anyway we are having siestas.
The worst I have read about foreign customs is about one being accused of torturing one’s own children and children being taken away from one. Can’t we all understand that nothing is really right or wrong but thinking makes it so? Dr. Spock (at least in my day) exhorted us NOT to pick up babies when they cry and if you can’t bear the din then put on the washing machine (those days no machine was silent). Now is that okay by our standards? Won’t we sack the ayah immediately?
So is the answer to go by the laws of the host country?
santhasays@gmail.com
(The writer is the Managing Director, JWT Mindset)
