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thesoapbar-blog1 · 8 years ago

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This is an excerpt from my Master’s Dissertation Thesis, 2017.

Servicing Safety at Your Doorstep

The most striking feature of my observations was the way the home was constituted and how working women relate to it. In several ways, women are redefining what a home means - it is no longer a shelter for the depoliticized, private family (of the middle classes) but has opened up to several possibilities of sociality between the different kinds of women living in it. One of my respondents, Parvati Patil, coming from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu lives with four other women in a luxurious apartment located in the complex of Cyber Hub, Gurgaon. One of the compulsory events in the house is for everyone to have dinner together at the dining table, “like a family”. This includes five working women, their full-time maid and their pet dog, Caramel. Another respondent, Mehek, when asked which her bedroom was replied that she does not have a bed assigned; she and the two other women take turns sleeping in any of the three beds in two rooms. A sense of community is forged between the inhabitants of the house who did not know each other before sharing the intimate space of the home. Thus, the social community of flatmate-ship is forged by economies of rent - unknown women come to live with each other in the same space out of the need to find suitable housing with the purchasing power of their wage and social status. This purchasing power comes from having had a secondary education which acts as a stepping stone to employment. For women in the current project, all of whom have received a higher secondary education, values pertaining to financial independence, lifestyle choices and mate selection were deeply influenced by the education they received. Parvati Patil, whose childhood career fantasies involved becoming an actress or an air hostess is now an environmental consultant. Always inclined towards doing something for the environment she wanted to study and work in a field that, according to her, brings about change in some way. She went on to study Environmental Engineering at the undergraduate and postgraduate level in the UK before landing a high paying job for an international environment auditing company in Delhi. She met a man in her university, now working as a Graphic Designer in Sri Lanka, whom she fell in love with and the two are now committed to marry each other eventually.

Her workload keeps her extremely busy and she barely has time to have a social life. “Sometimes when things get really hard with work I want to be a housewife to a really rich person but that’s just a fantasy.” Her choice of career reflects her opinions of which professions are altruistic, which are glamorous and not having a profession means being able to live a comfortable, luxurious life from a rich husband, even if only as a fantasy. Even so, she often does not have much to say when her flatmates are having heated conversations about technology, their corporate work and interests. The five flatmates have a system of housework duties that each one performs. Parvati is in charge of paying the rent while her friend does the grocery shopping. Living as friends who split the labour of paying bills, buying groceries and having dinner together like a family, these women mark a turn in the working life of Delhi, and more specifically Gurgaon. Every week on a Friday night, they make it a point to have dinner together and a wine party, in a way re-creating the upper middle class family that they come from. What sets it apart, however, is the sociality between single working women. “We walk in on each other naked sometimes; if someone has a boyfriend over or a party then two or three of us sleep in my bedroom or the maid sleeps in one of our rooms.” On the day she moved in, they had a wine party to celebrate her moving in. Interestingly they get their alcohol delivered to the doorstep because it is unsafe to venture out in the dark in a city where there are no streetlights on the main road. She lives in an apartment complex in the middle of Cyber Hub, walking past expensive restaurants and pubs on her way to work. The line of apartment complexes in this area forms a miniature skyline of Gurgaon marking the corporate lifestyle of the city. Like Parvati, people who live here work in the nearby retail brands which have their glass window offices all over Gurgaon. While Parvati walks to work, one of her flatmates drives a car and some others travel by auto during the day and by cab at night.

Public safety, or rather safety of women is a concern taken into account by the developers in the city. Posh housing complexes and the rapid metro are architectural manifestations of the safety that the city is constructed in. This concern for safety extends to the services provided for residents, the consumers. Door to door services are not just limited to alcohol but also to beauty parlour services, a dog walker and of course, cab services. Thus, Parvati’s ethnograph suggests that safety comes at a high-cost, that is almost equivalent to comfort and luxury and corporeal landscape of Gurgaon is reflective of this proliferation of a neo-liberal economy. The popular perception of Gurgaon is that it is an unsafe city for women, implying that middle and upper class women need safety from potential threat of sexual violation.

“I’m the youngest in my office so they kinda baby me. It’s usually cute and sweet but sometimes it gets too much. More than one day in a week I have to work till 9-9 30 and my boss always insists that he’ll walk me home because it’s late. 9 30 is not late for me!”

However, the extent to which services are provided at the doorstep sometimes have little to do with safety and a lot more to do with a luxurious lifestyle. Services like online delivery of groceries, the beauty parlour lady coming home for women in the complex and a community dog walker are all instances of high end hospitality.

“Most of the grocery shopping is done online, through the app GrocerMax. One of my friend buys fruits from a mandi near her family home in Delhi or Panipat but that’s once a month. For everything else we order online from GrocerMax. For emergency milk and curd there’s a shop downstairs in the society which has everything but it’s more expensive because it’s inside the complex.”

Online applications like GrocerMax, Grofers and Big Basket deliver groceries to the doorstep all around Delhi too. What I find striking in this encounter is that the store within the apartment complex is more expensive than ordering online. In my own experience, the prices of fruits and vegetables on Big Basket are more expensive than buying them from a local market in say, Azadpur or Model Town. That Parvati chooses online shopping because it is cheaper speaks of a certain relative class comfort. To illustrate further, Splitwise is a mobile application that allows you to split costs while purchasing goods and services in a group. Most women living in independent housing use it to split costs with flatmates. This is one of the reasons why Parvati finds it comfortable to live with other working women,

“The thing about having flatmates is I can owe up to 8 grand to someone at the end of the month and they’ll say it’s okay, pay me back at the end of the month. Even if you can’t afford food your friends can so having flatmates is good.”

While it is perhaps a comfortable living arrangement, what I want to compare here is that my own Splitwise balance never exceeds more than 500-600 rupees. Being able to casually accept late payment of a sum that is not very modest is indicative of an upper middle class lifestyle. Thus, receiving services to the doorstep may not always be related to safety which was the initial reason for extending services.

By causally relating this perception to the reach of services up to the consumer’s doorstep, the stark contrast between the gated communities of Gurgaon’s apartments and the lack of mobility on the streets except in private cars is constitutive of the luxurious lifestyle of corporate working. These gated communities have more than 15-20 floors, are equipped with amenities like gym, centralized air conditioning, club house, parks, sports and playing areas and high level security. In the 3-4 km radius around Cyber Hub, I could not see an independent house or a small apartment building. When I entered the apartment complex with Parvati, I was almost not surprised to see her swipe a card for unlocking the gate. It is for the same reasons of secure living that she had to clear an interview by her now flatmates to get an apartment room of her choice in the prime location of Cyber Hub. It’s close vicinity to major corporate companies like Deloitte, Zomato, Google, Citibank, Pepsi and several other retail brands coupled with the electronic security mentioned above makes it a desirable yet difficult to attain apartment. In this manner, mere purchasing power was inadequate to buy the room that ensured security and pampered her tastes. It was important for her to be living a similar lifestyle so as to be able to dwell in a house suitable to her.

Transporting Safety

In the metropolitan capital city of Delhi, transport plays a major role in transforming its demographic. There is a characteristic arrangement of universities in the north and south campuses, news agencies and government offices in central Delhi and concentration of corporate brand offices in Gurgaon. The Delhi metro is as instrumental in the distribution of the working population as the location of offices and workplaces. It not only connects important residential colonies with work areas but is also strategically constructed to ensure women’s safety in areas that were hitherto less populated and perceived to be unsafe at night. Here, I want to focus on two phases of the metro rail operations. One of the earliest routes to operate was the yellow line between Kashmere Gate and Vishwavidyala in 2004, right after the red line between Tiz Hazari and Shahdara. Immediately after, the yellow line was extended up to Rajiv Chowk (Connaught Place). This connected areas near Old Delhi such as Chandni Chowk, Kashmere Gate, Jama Masjid and their surrounded markets with the colleges of Delhi University and, more importantly, the erstwhile Vidhan Sabha or the state legislative assemblies in North Delhi. Thus, the first phase of operations of the Delhi metro were constructed keeping in mind that Delhi is a seat of governance of the country. Interestingly, one of my respondents, Nala, is of the perception that the first line to operate was the yellow line between Central Secretariat and Vishwavidyala.

“Shridharan and Sheila Dikshit deserve credit irrespective of their political views now because the first metro line connected Old Delhi, North Campus and South Delhi. Even though South seems more the presentable, professional life of Delhi, this line ensured that girls from south could go to North campus colleges safely.”

What she means is that several colleges in South Delhi like Lady Shri Ram, Gargi College and Kamla Nehru College came up in the middle class neighbourhoods of South Delhi where presumably upper caste Hindu families could send their daughters for higher education close to home and therefore, they would be safe. While it might be true that the metro is a significant social paradigm that disciplines the population of Delhi strategically, the perceived safety of women has little to do with the transport system. Nala, who has lived in Delhi since 2005, first as a student and then as a university professor is convinced that the metro made it possible for young girls from South Delhi families to be able to receive quality education. In this manner, mobility through the city with its planned routes of movement, is a way of performing upper class (and upper caste) femininity that revolves around the idea of safety (presumably from lower class men).

It is not until 2010, 8 years later, that we see a deliberate attempt to connect the upper class working areas - the yellow line extends from Rajiv Chowk till HUDA City Center and the Violet line emerges connecting Badarpur at the Delhi-Haryana border. It is, in fact, now that the working population of South Delhi is connected to the central and northern parts of the city. Further, Nala observed that the Violet line is constructed in a way to bring the lower class working populations from the outskirts of the Delhi-NCR regions to the hospitals, offices and residential colonies of South Delhi:

“Why is the Violet line so sucky? Because it is really the service line. It brings lower class women work force from the depths of Haryana to the posher, workable areas of the first few metro stations on Violet line.”

What she means by sucky here is that the trains on the Violet line are extremely crowded and less frequent than the other lines. Domestic workers, nurses, receptionists commute daily to work in the posh bungalows and hospitals near Lajpat Nagar, Moolchand, Sarita Vihar and Jangpura. This was further confirmed by another respondent, Kashish who works as a junior resident doctor at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in Sarita Vihar. Several nursing hostels are located nearby. Kashish lives in a room set accommodation in a colony in Sarita Vihar and travels either by the metro or in an auto to work. She only sits in the women’s compartment when unaccompanied, and especially at night.

An important feature of the Delhi metro is that it is a significant social tool in connecting the capital city of Delhi with the surrounding cities of Gurgaon, Faridabad and Noida to compose the Delhi-NCR region. Although Gurgaon and Noida are located in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh respectively, their proximity to and shared working culture with Delhi blur their political boundaries. The NCR mapping is quite central to the development of residences in these areas. The Rapid Metro runs in a loop from Sikanderpur and back in order to transport working populations within Gurgaon. In fact, several metro stations in this area are funded by private companies - Vodafone Belvedere Towers (Rapid Metro), Indigo Guru Dronacharya (DMRC), Cyber City (Rapid Metro), HTC HUDA City Center (DMRC) and Bank of Baroda Sikanderpur (DMRC). There is an implicit connection between safety, comfort/luxury, work and transport that the Rapid Metro makes. It begins and terminates at a point where it connects with the DMRC; its interiors include an electronic display machine, more comfortable seats and much more space than the Delhi Metro and its stations are all brand offices of high end companies. Although the distances between consecutive stations on the Rapid Metro are not half as much as the distances between stations on the Delhi Metro, huge investments have been made to construct and operate it to ensure safety. The Rapid Metro plays an instrumental role in constituting the upper class lifestyle of Gurgaon, enmeshing within its networking strategy the safety of its passengers, especially women. Parvati, in fact, rarely travels by the metro within Gurgaon because it does not connect places of leisure, such as the Sector-29 complex, to her home/office.

#delhimetro #cities #research #gurgaon #urbanstudies #singlewomen

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