Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Let's mistreat some robots, what say?

At a party I attended a while ago, a friend of mine, self-admitted doting dad, was having his daily phone conversation with his daughter, currently studying in the US. (Funded entirely by him, of course.)

‘Yes, sweetie, no, sugar,’ my friend went, giving the soon-to-be-laid-out dessert section a complex. Choochie pies, puppy dolls, babykins and honey boo boos were flying like missiles, as our Father of the Year took large sips of his Scotch.

Meanwhile, a small-made girl from the north-eastern part of our great land (shame on me for categorising her thus, I ought to have known which state she was from), of about twenty, twenty-two, stood by with a large platter of chicken something-or-the-other. Quietly, somewhat fearfully, worried she might drop the platter.

Our friend, still in the throes of long-distance filial love, selected a couple of minutely examined pieces and put them on his plate. The girl took this as a cue to leave. Friend snapped his fingers and pointed at his plate. Because, you see, if he spoke to the young waitress, it would mean breaking his conversation for a second. And he couldn’t do that, could he? What would his Princess Rasagulla Poopins in distant California think if he wasn’t giving her his complete attention? But he needed a third piece of chicken, too, obviously. For his opening gambit, snack-wise, was always three pieces. His wife knew it. I knew it. Everyone knew it. It was written in stone. And it was as good a time as any to let the waitress know what to do when she brought the next platter.

The young woman took the piece our friend had magisterially pointed at with his fork and served it to him. Her hand trembled. Friend nodded his head to say he was done. For now. He would be beckoning her soon enough with raised hand or finger snap obviously, when his next requisition needed to be dealt with on a war footing.

‘Well,’ my friend said, a minute later, his conversation with Butter Bonbon done, his mouth full of poultry. ‘What’s the news, man?’

The irony of his darling daughter being the exact same age as the young waitress seemed to have whooshed past him like an outswinger. I stuck my hand out and shook his.

‘What?’ he said.

‘I think we’re officially ready for the robots, man,’ I said.

‘You do say the strangest of things, you know,’ he said, laughing.

Personally, as a nation, I think we’ll adapt only too easily to robots. Because certain humans don’t exist for us at all except for their utility value. We consider their feelings about as much as we consider the feelings of, say, microwaves, hairdryers or bottle openers. The one issue with robots I do foresee, though, is that mistreating them — that quintessentially Indian need of needs — may not give us the same amount of pleasure as mistreating a warm-blooded human seems to. But I’m sure our tech guys will figure out a way to make robots feel pain and humiliation soon enough.

The recent conviction of the Hindujas by Swiss authorities for the treatment they meted out to their domestic help, sadly, didn’t shock (or even surprise) me one bit. Because it’s just one more example of how most of us view those who help us with our daily lives. For every headline-making Hinduja or Khobragade, there’s the friend who makes his driver stay up Saturday nights as he bar-hops, the neighbour who makes the caregiver of her octogenarian father bring her own tiffin carrier, the colleague whose nanny waits in the lobby as the family dines at an exclusive restaurant or the sibling who has his ‘gofer’ take off his shoes when he returns from work. We are, after all, the nation that individually abandoned our domestic help during lockdown by abruptly cutting off their salaries, and betrayed our guest workforce collectively as we watched them walk hundreds of kilometres, back to the homes they had left behind.

On a slightly upbeat note, for nearly ten years, we’ve been the grateful beneficiaries of this kind, patient and forever-jovial woman who cooks for us. A couple of days ago, her daughter came by to assist us with some proofing/indexing work on a book we are putting together. (I hasten to add that we can’t take any credit for young woman’s current position as a freelance editor. Her path to a better life was the result of her mother’s resilience and foresight long before she met us, and the education that was put in place by our earlier leaders, who we are being told did nothing for us.)

You would think this was justice, right? It is a step in the right direction perhaps. But justice it isn’t.

Justice is when my kid works for her kid. Or better still, if I’m employed by her. Soon. Tomorrow.

As for poetic justice, that would be the father of the young waitress, now the CEO of an international hotel chain, being served hors d’oeuvre by my friend’s daughter, currently laid off from the job Daddy’s connections got her.