Shoe-shine eviction soils city biz image

Boot polishers are entrepreneurs like dabbawallahs, but we don't like grubby people James Brown, ‘The Godfather of Soul’, redefined 20th century’s popular music with frenzied boldness. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, was the guest of honour at our Republic Day celebrations in 2004.

Both men polished shoes before they got to stride through respectful heraldry in expensive footwear. Those who polish your shoes in city stations may not have enough time to scamper out of their hardscrabble lives. In fact, their lives are going to be shut down.

The state government plans to privatise the shoe-shine segment in suburban-train stations. Perhaps it is for the good.

You could soon have your shoes cleaned by ‘polish executives’ who are capable, while ‘rendering service’, of engaging you in small-talk with the rehearsed attentiveness of air hostesses. Perhaps the polish they use will luminously endure the flying soot on the way to work, and even last till the return journey is complete.

But will the ragged shoe-shine men, who currently add one redeeming feel-good swipe to crumpled corporate uniform, survive their eviction? It is easy to yield to the temptation of romanticising the lives of our shoe-shine men.

Amitabh Bachchan – the pre-eminent setter of India’s emotional compass – demonstrates such pluck in Dewaar as a shoe-shine boy that the villain issues one of the most inadvertently prescient character analyses in Bollywood history.

The kid, says the villain, is a lambe race ka ghoda. The kid grows up to be a scruffy, but lovable, hero.

I fix the shoe-shine men’s image problem on that transition. Heroes grow out of them. They cannot polish shoes and swagger heroically into newspaper sections that suck up to celebrities.

There is a wonderful true story about a city shoe-shine man who saved enough to send his son to study in the US. The young expatriate, now said to be a Chicago resident, has persuaded his father to retire.

The story will, at best, serve as model for professional inspirers who peddle platitudinous motivation at a vertiginous cost. Shoe-shine men do not come home like the dabbawallahs; they are corralled into designated corners.

In fact, most people would miss them but for the thwack-thwack-thwack solicitation call made with shoe brushes. Shoe-shine men are too grubby for management graduates to study: we will never know whether they achieve the Six-sigma level of efficiency.

This enforced anonymity and our irrational – and mean-minded – indifference towards those who engage in manual labour has made it easy for the government to shunt shoe-shine men into oblivion.

Since we don’t care, the government will not consider making them stakeholders in the privatisation exercise. We will continue to have our shoes polished, we don’t care who does it.

Here is one matter-of-fact, practical reason why you should. Back when the British felt Indian manual labourers would get tired fast while laying the railway line up the hills of Lonavala, Lord Irwin, the then governor general, came up with the idea to increase the efficiency.

He ‘outsourced’ (yes, it dates back that far) a local man to serve a peanut-jaggery mix to the workers to boost their energy. The man, who dispensed the ‘energy’ snack, set up a business that eventually grew into what we today know as Maganlal Chikkiwala, which is into its fourth generation.

raghu@dnaindia.net