Over at my other home in Chennai, the family decided to bestow upon me, the decidedly wretched task of finding a new maid. Having done that, they gave me the even more wretched task of having to go to the local cop house to get her background verification report thingie.
You see, of late, maids have to be registered at the local police station, and all employers of maids have to get a ref check done on them before employing them. It's a voluntary thing of course, but highly recommended. And of course, all new parents insist on it.
I thought it was rather absurd. Aren't only petty criminals and not so petty criminals registered in there?
But my sister has every right to be paranoid. You see, maids have a new modus operandi. They drug the baby, and when the parents are away at work, put them out to beg on the streets, lugged around by a fake mother who presents the child as her own starving little 200th wonder of the world.
I wouldn't have believed it, if my family hadn't known somebody who knew somebody who was a 300-kilometer-away neighbor of some poor family who found their kid being used as a decoy to beg, when a friend saw the kid and thought the kid was familiar.
That solitary incident will soon enough, be being media frenzied into a state where the odd idiot maid (I mean, come on, you gotta at least attempt to disguise the kid if you're gonna take the risk of making him/her beg in public, right?) is thought of to be a part of a bigger conspiracy; a conglomerate of maids who profiteer at their employers' expense.
It's bad enough how paranoid new parents are. This incident has just given them all the more ammo to go cuckoo to the point where they need the straitjacket more than their bratty kids do. And well, my family's no stranger to the concept of paranoia.
On the bright side, Baby Fat isn't required for the production of Cosmetics. Doesn't that put all you parents out there a wee bit more at ease?
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