House maids a rare species
Every family suffers their worst nightmares during the winter months when their house maids leave on a two-month vacation. Most maids are from the Adivasi or Garo communities residing in Assam. They serve well but need their winter break as they find the months of mid December to January end too cold to bear. Life without a maid is unthinkable. They are your women Friday and they can be relied upon to cook, clean, pick up the kids from school and other chores. These maids are often eccentric and like to change homes every two years. Their mistresses are always on tenterhooks wondering if they will return after the winter break. In fact the whole business of maids has become an obsession and can give you a headache and depression because your entire life depends on them. Many women are able to go out to work because they have a dependable maid. People lose sleep agonizing over when their maids will leave them. A former vice-principal of a city based government school and an octogenarian who lost her home maid was about to get a new replacement from Guwahati. The former educationist was joyous at the news, bought a new quilt and identified a room for the “new guest” in her house. Such is the demand for house maids that this new guest had to be brought from Guwahati in a reserved tourist taxi. But as often happens the maid changed her mind at the eleventh but not before incurring a huge loss for her mistress who sent the tourist taxi all the way to Guwahati to fetch the maid. How can anyone say that there is unemployment in Meghalaya?
Repairs and construction works galore
Call it a last minute peace-making with sulking constituents or a genuine desire to perk up the constituency but everywhere you go there is large scale repair work in localities across Shillong and beyond. Some of the new candidates have used the earthmovers (which villages happily call the JCB) to the maximum to flatten out hillocks and make roads where there were none and playgrounds (mainly football grounds) for the youth to kick around in. In certain areas of the city repairs works on some lanes have happened after nearly 20 years. They had been left in a shambles by their legislators who had served the constituencies earlier. Repair work is no violation of the Election Code of Conduct Rules. Yet where in the city will there be a new lane or footpath today? Every other one needs expansion or repair. And each of these contract works are being executed by so-called ‘contractors’ who spring up overnight and then sub-contract their work to others. The idea is to make a cut out of the work, no matter how it is executed. This is where the MLA scheme is a total waste of public money!