My walk, guards and labor

This morning, I took a walk in Cubbon park which about 5 minutes plus
one terrifying street crossing from my apartment. It was a wonderful
thing to do. Once you get in deep enough, you find mostly sounds of
nature, not of cars. No exhaust. I've posted pictures at
http://burnsfisher.com/India2006/CubbonPark .

There is a statue of Queen Victoria at the entrance. Apparently they
erected it shortly after her death "by public subscription". Yeah, I'm
sure all the Indians in Bangalore gave plenty to honour their formor
Empress (her title something like 'Queen of England and Ireland and
Empress of India'). Well maybe the English here did.

There are also some interesting birds to be spotted in the park. One
was a large raptor that looked like a bald-headed eagle but it's body
was more of a reddish brown than a chocolate brown like the American
Bald-Headed has. Plus all kinds of ease to see but common birds like
crows, magpies, and so on.

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But I was going to write about labor. It is obvious everywhere you look
that unskilled labor is cheap and plentiful. Essentially every
residence and even slightly-large business has one or more guards. I
don't know if they are prepared to deal with any sort of actual crime,
but they serve all kinds of functions like preventing people from
parking in front of the driveway, ensuring people don't loiter, helping
drivers (or at least THEIR drivers) back in and out in the narrow
driveways and streets.

People own and drive their own motorscooters but if they use a taxi,
they hire the taxi not for just a trip but for 4 hours or for the day or
whatever. The driver just hangs around somewhere at your beck and call
(via cell phone) during that time.

Construction is largely done by hand (and continually around the clock
in many cases). Sand is screened manually, concrete is mixed and
carried manually, heights are reached via bamboo scaffolding.

And the oddest thing of all to me is that guard from your particular
building salutes as you go out, generally with "Good morning, sah". I
generally wave and say "hi". I have read that saying "Good morning"
puts you at equal status with the guard, which would be ok by me, but
not by him. BTW, if, in fact, I have convinced blogger to post a
picture, it will be of a residential street near my apartment. I'm not
sure if you can see the guards, but they are at each driveway.

My point about this whole thing is that it evolves from the labor
market. It's not that, say, "India is too backwards to have burglar
alarms and contruction equipment" Good grief, they can launch
satellites, they could do this other stuff if it were a priority. But
it's not. It is (1) traditional and (2) a rational response to
conditions. I also understand that I am saying this as a person of
privilege. How these unskilled workers would react to what I'm saying
is a different question.