Our cook has some ambition!!!!

She cooks really bad food. One day she made "gobi" in cooker. No it wasn't meant to be a gravy.........The other day we had to remove excessively burnt "jeera" from the paneer sabji before we could eat it. Some times when we come back from office we feel as if it's a 'langar' at our house because the food cooked would last us six days.

Well our experience of staying forever away from homes has taught us not to expect much from cooks but she is exceptionally extraordinary. :)

However, she is a great mom to an almost sixteen girl, and a to be matriculate boy. She is not a cook (and cleaner, and washer-woman) by choice however,.....well perhaps nobody is. Her hubby was a cabbie but one fine day stopped going to work.

She had to pull her son out of the private school and use the cheaper government school. However, as has been found in research even the poor in India prefer sending their children to private schools. "The Beautiful Tree" by James Tooley captures this empirically across a number of nations.

So, our cook started to work - and experiment on us - to sustain her family and to send her son to a private school. Remarkably, this is not just a street-side private school. It's some kind of a convent on the air-force road in Gurgaon. And she pays more than what i used to pay for my day schooling at MontFort in Delhi.

This, however, would have been a dream a few years back. To find so much work (employment) in Sukhrali Village of Gurgaon would have been impossible. With the job boom in Gurgaon, there is work for so many of cooks, taxi-drivers. Some would like to quickly jump out here and say 'so u're happy seeing these people as serving you, is this what u call progress?' No, certainly not but this is how it begins. And i can see the signs of it happening.

Geeta's (our cook) son would go into a better profession. Although he is studying currently he also has a part time job in one of the hospitals in Gurgaon where he has to do some normal checks in procurement etc. His 2k is a big contribution in the family income. And the girl child .......she has almost completed her studies .....plus a vocational IT course and is hopeful of landing a fair enough job. Well this is progress in society according to me. Wouldn't you agree?