Minister of employment: my side job in India

Commonweal, Nov 19, 2004 by Jo McGowan

My first morning back in India after a trip to the United States, my daughter woke me at 8:00 a.m. to say that a young woman wanted to meet me. Jetlagged and foggy, I asked my daughter to send her to my office (I am the director of a school for children with speical needs) and promptly went back to sleep. When I finally stumbled in to work at 10:30, the young woman was there, patiently waiting for me.

My staff was quite excited, wanting to tell me all that had happened in my absence. But, as none of us could relax with this stranger in our midst, I cut short our greetings and asked the woman to come to my office. She followed me in, sat down, and promptly burst into tears. I knew immediately that she needed a job and also that she would have no training, no experience, and nothing but sheer desperation to offer. Her story, when she could collect herself enough to tell it, was achingly familiar: father dead, mother uneducated, she the eldest of four, and responsible for everyone's education and marriage.

I offered what sympathy I could and promised to think about it and get back to her in the next few days. But the next few days flew by. Every would-be employee in town seemed to have my address that week. At home the same afternoon, sitting at the table for lunch, we noticed a woman on the road, peering into the window. When I went out to ask what she wanted, she said her brother worked for my school as a driver and she needed a job too. No, she didn't have any skills. Back in the office the next day, the chaprasi (office assistant) begged me to give his son--a high-school dropout, no experience, but a good, hard-working boy--a job as a gardener. By the end of the week, I had had no fewer than ten requests, all from people with no qualifications, no training, and no experience.

And no qualms about saying so! Training? They look at me quizzically. Who has money for training? Where would I get experience if I don't have a job? Questions about what they would like to do are met with total blankness. I'd like to do anything, one young man told me fervently, anything at all.

I have a job I love, and part of it involves holding career workshops to encourage high school and college students to consider working in the field of special needs. Even though our goal is to recruit more would-be speech therapists and special educators, we go to great lengths to help the participants explore their own personalities and try to find a career that's a good fit. "It's what you are going to spend most of your life actually doing," we explain to the kids. "Being a doctor isn't just something you get to tell people at cocktail parties. You actually have to look inside people's infected ears. You have to get up in the middle of the night if you're on call. Are you sure that's what you want to do?"

Considering the vast majority of middle-class Indian students who are mindlessly going through the motions of getting an education and choosing a career--all the while knowing they will most probably end up doing whatever their parents have decided for them--these workshops seem vital, a public service in fact. Save us from a nation of people who don't particularly care what they are doing with their lives as long as they get a paycheck at the end of the month.

But then when I think about the dozens of people who come to my door looking for work--any kind of work--this seems unrealistic. Finding the perfect job, refusing to settle for anything less, doing only what one really wants to do: what a luxury!

So much in India is like this: life stripped down to its bare essentials, making the things well-to-do people fret over seem totally irrelevant. Who cares if the curtains match the couch, the room has a view, or which college our children get into? Does it really matter if we wear the same outfit twice in one week? Will the sky fall if we can't buy a second car, or even if we can't pay the rent and have to move into a smaller place?

There are times when I feel like shaking the average upper-class person into awareness: "Count your blessings!" I want to shout. Do you have the slightest idea what three-quarters of the world would give to have your choices, your problems?

Still, there are other times when I feel like shaking the average job-seeker here instead: Raise your expectations! Demand more of life! How many unqualified people can I hire out of pity? So often I want to tell those who come to me for work that if they had more self-respect, they might convince me to give them a chance. But the sad truth is that the people who are most desperate to work are the least likely to stand on their dignity. And without experience, education, or skills, dignity is really all they've got.