MY TAKE

KEEPING UP WITH THE KOHLIS

“You’re middle class. Too poor to be rich and too rich to be poor, so you don’t know where you belong.” Image credit: FOTOS on Unsplash.

By SHAGORIKA EASWAR

One of the things that shows up repeatedly in the stories desi immigrants share of their settling-in period in Canada is how they had to get used to doing things without househelp.

This applies across the board, whether they came decades ago or landed here this year. Everyone, but everyone, had someone to clean, a cook, a driver, and increasingly, a gardener. At the bare minimum.

We’re talking about people from the so-called middle class, here. But I have seen that same middle class change dramatically over the years.

A lady I know feels the need to say “My staff” when referring to her househelp. As in, “I’ve trained my staff to make all the family’s favourite dishes, I only go in once in a while to supervise”. She also speaks of the nanny who picks up the clothes her teenage daughters leave strewn around the room. 

Return gifts at children’s birthday parties are growing more and more elaborate. And this is not a recent phenomenon. Coming from Dubai where we were used to buying age- and gender-specific gifts for each child that attended our sons’ birthday parties, for our younger son’s fourth birthday – his first in Canada – I had a long list of things to get.

I was astonished when my friend Linda offered to take me shopping for return gifts to a dollar store. We’d met in the school yard and she’d taken me under her wing. She, in turn, was astonished at what I planned to do for return gifts. Kids expected nothing more than little loot bags filled with pencils, glowsticks, bead bracelets, and some candy, etc., she said.

During the same period, a colleague who relocated to India, wrote to say they were looking for wristwatches (inexpensive ones, he confessed sheepishly) as return gifts for a birthday party for their son.

Recently, a cousin in India mentioned their upcoming holiday in Mauritius. Hadn’t they just returned from a holiday in Cambodia, I asked.

“Are you ticking off all the places on your bucket list?”

“Not my bucket list, that of others in our apartment complex!” he said with a mock groan.

“You meet neighbours in the elevator and all they can talk about is their visit to some exclusive exhibition in Madrid. Their kids tease your kids about having gone to Disneyland – the new exciting thing to do is forest bathing in Japan.”

My parents – and others in their circle of family and friends – were highly-educated professionals, earning reasonably well. They all described themselves as “middle-class” and were proud of middle-class values.

We had househelp. And a car. We went to good schools. And on holidays to cites with a beach attached (Goa!) or to what we called hill stations. But that was about the extent of it. I can’t imagine my parents dreaming of holidays abroad or luxury cars.

“We define the middle class as those who enjoy economic security,” said Dr Rajesh Shukla, Managing Director and CEO, People Research on India’s Consumer Economy, an independent, not-for-profit think tank and fact tank, in his 2023 report The Rise of India’s Middle Class. “This means they are free from worry about monetary poverty and, as a consequence, are using their disposable income for discretionary consumption rather than subsistence. One definition of the middle class is that it comprises those whose income level is sufficient to allow them to enjoy economic security and who are safe from falling back into poverty or vulnerability.”

Of course, with rising salaries and with increased prosperity, those in the middle-income brackets are earning way more than our parents did. And while they may be counted as among the middle class by statisticians, they do their darndest to distance themselves from the category.

Hence the emphasis on bigger, more expensive, and exclusive. Be it in cars or having the “top doctor in the country” do your annual physical. Kids are becoming brand conscious about universities, too, I learn. A highly-rated but smaller institution fails in front of one with a “big name”.

And the lady selling dhania patta and mirchi (coriander and chillies) on a mat on a street corner now carries a phone and takes orders for avocados or blueberries. Good for her, no two ways about that, but I couldn’t help wondering how many people consume avocados or blueberries on a regular basis in Mumbai.

“You’d be surprised,” says my friend. “My son and daughter-in-law are going on a weekend trip to Singapore – they have reservations at a Michelin-starred restaurant for their anniversary.”

Some of this is progress, but some would be just plain silly if it wasn’t cause for stress.

“Everything is numaishi, exhibitionistic,” says another friend. “When it’s all about the exterior, what you are able to show, then the real value of things and experiences becomes meaningless.”

“You’re middle class,” Alexander Skarsgård tells Kate Winslet in Lee. They are playing Roland Penrose and Lee Miller in the 2023 biographical war drama based on the life of WWII journalist Lee Miller. “Too poor to be rich and too rich to be poor, so you don’t know where you belong.”

An apt description of the middle class as any I’ve come across.

As for where that leaves good old middle class values, well, that’s a discussion for another day.

DO YOU QUALIFY?

Who belongs to the “upper class”, as defined by Stephen Gadaleta in You’re Officially “Upper Class” If You Pay For These Services, an article in Money Digest?

The services include:

• Home cleaning.

• Personal shopping. These experts buy products such as groceries and clothing for clients.

• Full-service groundskeeping.

• Full-time childcare.

• Private chef (maharaj or cook aunty).

• Personal trainer.

• Accounting and taxes.

• Investment & estate planning

• Art authentication.  

• Private security.

• Chauffeur.

• Jet charter.

Though most desis would claim many of the privileges he lists as par for course for the middle class!