Hello mutineers! I’ve been holed up in my east-coast satellite bunker for a while now, perfecting my Gleeson Grip, watching test cricket and savagely turning my back on a lacto-vegetarian upbringing.

I have been trying to keep up, however, and came upon this little gem of an article via our newstab (thanks Brij), relating the life of a peculiar kind of Yogi–one who may be tempted by “Extreme” branded potato chips.

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One of the many standard narratives populating accounts of the desi experience in the US is the difficulty in explaining the vast numbers of ‘servants’ performing a vast litany of semi-skilled labor in homes all over south asia. In the context of the American D.Y.I mentality (definitely eroded by our service economy), it seems incredibly strange to employ somebody for the purpose of cooking or taking one’s children to school–an unjustified expense when one has the time and the means of transportation to complete the task. NPR correspondent Eric Weiner entered this discussion as a result of being posted in Delhi and summarized his interactions with his ‘servant,’ “Kailash” in the New York Times. Cultural relativists, as critics of the post-modern regime in the humanities are wont to remark, do a disservice to academia when they uncritically accept what they see as a ‘cultural practice’ on the grounds of it simply belonging to a culture different from the observer’s own:

A few days later, the servant loped upstairs and reported for duty. He was skinny, alarmingly so, with mahogany skin and sharp features. His name was Kailash, and he was 11 years old. This was a cultural difference that I was not prepared to accept.

Weiner clumsily avoids the relativist’s folly by boldly going where perhaps a million other travel writers have gone, “It’s strange to me and feels wrong, so I can’t accept it.” But, like many before him, Weiner must eventually capitulate:

I started downstairs to confront the landlord, but then hesitated. I rationalized that if this boy, an orphan from a neighboring state, didn’t work for me, he would work for someone else, and who knows how that person would treat him? Washing my hands of Kailash seemed like a cop-out, or so I told myself.

It was at this point that I remembered a similar strain of teeth-gnashing from a writer of yesteryear:

Take up the White Man’s burden– Ye dare not stoop to less– Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness;

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