I GET a spam call from a girl who asks which bank has issued my credit card, and I say, “Sperm Bank.” She asks if it is a foreign bank. I say it’s Indian. She asks for the spelling of ‘Sperm’. Listening to her, I am delighted at the progress the nation has made. I am not being sarcastic, partly because sarcasm is the second lowest form of humour, but chiefly because her response is truly a good omen. Another day, I am as delighted when I hear a flight attendant struggle to make a coherent announcement in both Hindi and English. There was a time when flight attendants were disturbingly articulate. Some had the attributes of a model. I knew a girl who was a state topper and a swimming champion. I rejoice when the person behind a counter in a multiplex can’t tell the difference between 325 and 32.5, as though the dot is some design element. Baristas at coffee shops no longer have the urban swag of a music band that they used to have when cappuccinos first came to India. And in five-star hotels, waiters have the meek wonder of those who come from places that have no five-stars. This is very good.

There is an ideal mediocrity all around in some tedious professions. It is a sign that India has progressed so much that the smartest, or simply the luckiest, do not have to do jobs for which they may be socially or intellectually overqualified. It is a sign that a segment of Indians who were once so inexpensive to hire that companies could afford them for dreary work have priced themselves out of such work and moved to more complex or rewarding jobs, or at least different sorts of dreary jobs, or maybe have even opted to do nothing, which is not a bad way to be.

Until about 25 years ago, Indians went to a restaurant and just asked for “coffee.” Then the café-chain Barista opened. What a naive time it was for a cafe to be called ‘Barista.’ It’s like a bar called ‘Bar-Tender.’ But it was all so new and swanky that many of us had to rehearse a bit before we said “cappuccino”.

I felt it then, that there was something wrong if the staff at a café seemed more refined and cool than a nation’s general population, often even the customers at the cafe. You may argue that this is exactly the case in a rich-world café today—they are manned by the hip. But that is because many baristas in, say, Europe or America are students making side-money; or they only look upmarket as most people appear to us in a rich society. In any case their skills and personality are not qualitatively rare in their nation.

In 2000, in India, Barista should not have been able to afford the sort of youngsters who agreed to work there. They did not last long. The call-centre revolution came, and many of them moved to that, and those who now served coffee had a different social profile. The call-centre mania, too, pointed to a nation that was so poor that some of its smartest, or at least most articulate, could be absorbed by that industry. Around then, I had a friend who could have chosen any field but became a flight attendant because it paid her the most among the paths she could have taken in the country.

You can see this phenomenon at work in the Miss Universe or Miss World pageants. Generally, with some exceptions, beauty queens from rich countries are from modest backgrounds, while the women from very poor countries are from more socially advanced strata. This was one of the reasons behind the difference between Indian beauty queens like Sushmita Sen or Aishwarya Rai and many of their competitors. All that has changed now. It is not a surprise that Indian beauty pageant contestants today are not from homes where you would find avocados.

As India somewhat prospers, lower rungs of society are filling in the spaces vacated by the richer. Today, even personal wealth managers are not all that urbane anymore.

You may argue that this is still a nation where thousands of graduates apply for menial government jobs. In September, about 40,000 graduates and 6,000 post-graduates applied for a sweeper’s job in the Haryana government. But this only points to the farce of college degrees. These were people who probably felt the job befitted them irrespective of the laminated pieces of paper they somehow collected in the name of higher education.

The argument I am making is not that India has progressed enough to employ its whole workforce, but that it has progressed enough to ensure that some segments of smart people are too expensive to recruit for basic jobs. Just as rich nations hire Indians to do jobs their citizens do not wish to, urban India is beginning to dip into emerging social segments for affordable hiring.

Meanwhile, some professions that were considered semi-skilled have become more gentrified. Once, when I had hair, I used to go to a place called Head Master, where a man who was called a ‘barber’ cut my hair for a pittance. Then ‘salons’ opened, where young people who appeared affluent and were called ‘hair stylists’ did the job.

But it is not clear to me what the new chic of India’s middle-class are doing today. What professions have absorbed them? Those suave guys who used to make cappuccinos and those articulate flight attendants—if they were young today, where would they be and what would they be doing? I don’t see them around anymore. Maybe there was a wave of young people who appeared briefly in the late 90s and aughts, playing surprising roles, but do not exist anymore.

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