INDIA TRIP PART 14: Living and travelling in South India – Servants, weather, bathrooms, drinking water, electricity

Remini has worked for my uncle for 40+ years

Servants
Everybody we stayed with had servants. Depending on the arrangement, some sleep at their house in their own area of the house, or some may just sleep on the floor of the living room.

Ammini cleaning jackfruit seeds

It seemed as if women mostly did cooking and cleaning, while men were guards, shopping, cleaning and taking care of the outside.

One aunt had a washing machine for clothes, but preferred to ask one of her servants to do the laundry by beating the clothes on a stone slab, as she said the clothes got so clean.

Most people said that it was getting really hard to get good, reliable help, nowadays.  Some servants have worked for the family for years, and sometimes after so many years of service, they can even earn a pension or a piece of land.


Getting around
People got around by bike, mopeds, motorbikes, cars, cars with drivers, taxis and auto rickshaws and busses, trains and boats.
We mostly had a car with a driver.





Indian salaries and what you can buy for your salary
It is very different what answer you get on how much people are earning (so don’t take any of the info below as definitive data):

• One person said that the average wage in India is 3000 Rs. per month (350 Danish kr.)
• We heard that a nurse can earn between 10000 - 14000 Rs. (1200-1750 Danish kr.) per month 
• An IT person earns about 20000 Rs. (2500 Danish kr.) per month

Some says the tax allowance is about 20000 Rs. Others say that if you earn 6000 Rs. before tax it comes out to 1200 Rs. after tax and then you have to pay taxes on the house on top of that.

A nice set of clothes cost 800 Rs. (100 kr.).
5 kg of rice cost 138 Rs. (15 kr.), and if you have a garden, then people will grow vegetables to eat with the rice.
In one part of Kerala, we were told that to build a 3 bedroom house, it would cost about 600000 kr.

when it rained, it poured

Weather in July
The temperature in Chennai was 27-37 Degrees Celsius.

The temperature in Kerala was 17-27 degrees Celsius.

It was the rainy season (a.k.a. monsoon season). It seems like it rained 1-1.5 hours each day except for a few exceptions, where it did not rain at all or one day where it rained all day.





Indian bathrooms
Indian toilets

Western and Indian style toilets

Most public toilets would have Indian toilets and western style toilets. Indian toilets are a hole where you squat over. Then they don’t have toilet paper, but a bucket of water and a pitcher to pour with, or a shower head on a hose next to the toilet. Even if there are western style toilets they will use water instead of toilet paper. The result is probably that you get cleaner. But the toilet seats are always wet when you get into the toilet and you don’t get dry after going to the toilet.

bucket bath

Showers
The hot water normally works in the way that you turn on a switch (like an electricity switch). There is a container of water on the wall that heats up and then you can get a hot shower after 10 minutes. Many people do not take showers, but instead take bucket baths.

Drinking

groundwater well

The water had to be either boiled or bought in bottles. Most places we visited, they collected rainwater in wells and that would be cleaner than drinking from the tap. Many places also still have groundwater wells.

We managed to not get diarrhea for real. In Denmark the kids are used to drink a lot of milk at home, in school, in cheese, yogurt, on cereal or food like pizza, lasagna, quiche, eggs etc. In India they don’t use as much milk as we do in Denmark. Only every once in a while we got the paneer, rasamalai, and ice cream. When the kids did get some milk, it was boiled warm milk to kill any potential germs, and sometimes even bought frozen.

Electricity
Electricity was in Chennai cut off between 17:00 and 18:00 because of shortage. In Kerala it was really unstable, so you never knew when it would cut off. When it did cut off, an inverter would convert electricity from a battery to run certain things in the house. For, example, no cooking could be done in that time, and we tried to shut off all the fans and most of the lights to preserve the battery. So, at those times the kids really got to appreciate living in a western place.