This is the name of Helen Fielding's first novel. Her Bridget Jones' Diary was hilarious though the I did not like the sequel that much. Cause Celeb was a complete surprise. It too sports a heroine (Rosie) in her 30s who has come to Africa following break up with her boyfriend Oliver. Oliver is too wrapped up in himself (I think he was the prototype of how bad boyfriends behave. Helen Fielding honed him to perfection in her second novel with Daniel Cleaver) and Rosie just about had enough. So she heads to Africa to work with an agency called SUSTAIN in a mythical country called Nambula. Her description of the aid agencies that throng the third world countries is just perfect. The ship is supposed to deliver food is going to arrive in 10 days (no one knows when the 10 days are going to end) and there is a locust swarm eating away the crops. As the refugee crisis escalates, it is up to Rosie to save the situation.
It is a nice novel- not frothy as Bridget Jones but not too serious either.
I have Maeve Binchy's novel to read. I have read only one book by her- a gift from one of my mamis. It was okay. I thought it was bit like a long romance novel. This one too seems to be headed that way so let us see how it goes.
Meantime, I am tad upset today. The apartment complex (if it can be called that) has 24 hour security. Apparently some of the tenants wanted it and so the University complied. The University has outsourced security so we have Group 4 Securicor providing security. The have assigned two agents to our complex. Each one does 12 hour duty. When the duty shift changes, one of them will have to do 24 hour shift. They are expected to work 7 days a week with no holidays. If they take a break, they are dismissed from service. The agent has been on duty for more than 24 hours because his replacement is late.
How can such a thing be allowed? Of course the problem is that there are always people ready to fill up an vacancy. The agency knows it and that is why they can make their people work under such inhuman conditions.
So I am as usual raving about it. I will have to raise a stink about it.
2 comments:
Our labour market is schizophrenic. If a worker is part of the small "organised" sector (especially the public sector) then he/she is well protected. The protection in the public sector is to such an extent that he/she can simple idle and yet avoid any reprisal. On the other hand, if he/she (especially she) is a part of the "unorganised" sector (as the security guards are) then he/she has little or no protection. Most of our labour laws apply to the "organised" sector only.
Your personal intervention may help the guards at your apartment complex - I sincerely hope so. But in the larger scheme of things, the answer lies in expanding job opportunities in the "organised" sector. This requires a series of measures tackling among other things changes to the labour law. Kaushik Basu has addressed this in his column for the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4103554.stm
Unfortunately, these measures are also the more contentious and there is little sign of this or any other government having the will to push them through.
Btw, I've been following the brouhaha over the dismissal and subsequent rehiring of the Jet Airways employees. True, the company was most callous in the way it dealt with the issue, but it was noteworthy that not one press report saw it fit to note that most of our workers (in the "unorganised" sector) live with similar callousness as a part of their daily lives. How many of our maid-servants (and others in similar type of jobs) are given a notification period and a "severance package" before dismissal?
Oh, the maidservants issue is another case. When I was in Bangalore, Meena used to work both for my landlady and me. My landlady believed in cutting salary if Meena took a day off. She would pressurize me to cut the salary too. It always seemed ridiculous because the amount she was paid was minuscule for the work done. So I would dodge the issue much to my landlady's displeasure. I also had to invent ways of compensating her for the work done by methods other than payment.
But I guess most people have no qualms in underpaying their servants. Or indeed of dismissing them without severance pay. Infact my colleague has a very innovative way of getting work done without pay any salary. She quarrels with them so dreadfully that the maids prefer to forgo salary. They work for a month, she quarrels with them, they stop, and she gets a month's work done free. The next month she gets another maid.
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