First Impressions

This will likely read like fluffy and superficial to some, with the tone of a visiting NRI.  But I believe First Impressions have value, denoting the initial reaction to things we see and the people we meet (and of course, immortalized by my favorite Jane Austen).

By the time we travelled the distance from Bangalore airport to Mysore road, from outside the northern tip of the city to the south, I was tired of the traffic.  It was fairly early in the morning (around 7.00am), but the bustling and teeming roads seemed already full.  I was happy to think of Mysore, happy that it was a smaller city, and happy that I didn’t live in Bangalore and did not plan to do so in the future.

The Bangalore-Mysore highway was also very busy, and the road bumps meant many slowing downs and picking up speeds.   As always the highway was lined with plenty of eating establishments.  The smaller road side establishments were still visible, but more visible were larger, newer, establishments. One was a nice vegetarian restaurant called ‘Adigas’ proudly proclaiming that they were part a chain.  (What surprised me most was the ‘we are hiring’ sign out front looking for everyone from cooks to dishwashers in a new branch they were opening somewhere.  Surely finding people, especially unskilled workers, required practically no advertisement – didn’t the workers at existing branches have relatives they were desperate to get hired?  Also, the sign was in English.)  Most other newer establishments included ‘wine’ and ‘bar’ in their signboards.   There were also wine shops which I am going to guess sell alcohol (not just wine). 

As we got close to Mysore, huge billboards advertised a variety of luxury accommodations, appealing eating places, and jewellery stores.  After we got home to Kuvempunagar and made trips to shops as we got settled in, some of these themes were obvious.  Wine (alcohol), umpteen eating places, jewellery stores, a new store selling meat, lots of new bakeries (selling decent looking cakes in addition to the traditional vegetable puffs and sweets) summed up the businesses that thrived in Kuvempunagar.  All of this does indicate wealth and changing patterns of spending.   I think I was most surprised by the number of jewellery shops, all within a few blocks of Kuvempunagar.

We had dinner at a local small restaurant, with crisp rava onion dosas and Indo-chinese food on the menu.  Yummm.   There was what looked to be a head waiter, several junior waiters, and low down the totem pole, the table cleaners.  They took dirty plates away and cleaned tables, but only the waiters served food.   As has universally been the case the table cleaners are young.  The boy who cleaned our table would have been in class IX or X, if he had been in school.   He was probably from a nearby village, and had to drop out of school or was forced out.  To my eyes he was sad and tired, and clearly at the bottom of the hierarchy at the restaurant.  The tip was pocketed by the waiter, and we had no easy way to tip the table cleaner.  As I was leaving India after my last trip a year ago, I had eaten at a restaurant in Bangalore where the table cleaner was about 10 or 11.  In spite of everything including the Right to Education Act, the meal I had when I left and the meal I had when I came back had this in common with my restaurant meals growing up - young, overworked, underpaid table cleaners.  And this is in Bangalore and Mysore, two relatively well-to-do cities.

 

However prosperous Mysore becomes, the lower ranks seemed to be always filled in with people ready to do any job.  Though some people had probably climbed into the lower middle, middle middle, and upper middle classes and were frequenting the jewellery shops and bakeries and wine shops it did not translate to job vacancies at the lowest levels – people just came in droves from around to fill them up.  I don’t hear of any difficulties in middle class homes finding maid servants.  I doubt the restaurant has any trouble finding table cleaners (notwithstanding the ‘we are hiring’ sign at Adigas).  And, there seems to be always people in temporary blue tarp tents – I have not yet figured out what these migrant workers do.  The blue tarps are around in vacant lots (mostly public) for a few days/weeks and then they disappear.  One year I heard they were digging ditches for fibre-optic cables.