If you hope across the border and go to Bangalore today, you will find acres and acres of tech campuses. Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard all have offices there. Many of the staff – coders, UX designers, managers – come from Kerala due to the high standard of education here. There are IT people all over Kochi too including those who work freelance for clients based anywhere in the world. This is the new sector that powers India as a service economy, that value adds to the raw materials be that jute or rice or gold. When you go to these new tech offices though you will be struck by how gendered they are. Like everywhere that is public in India, men dominate these offices. Invariably they are hungry, young guys there to advance their careers, many without wife or children just yet and willing to impress the boss by spending hours at a desk.  

In Kochi, this is the office culture that dominates. One hears talk about how ‘modern’ they are, discerning in such conversation a satisfaction in new economic progress, but one also recognises a gender politics that is anachronistic. How this imbalance works is not only in the relative incomes of people, but also in terms of recognition and respect. When you go to any formal event men dominate it. They are the guests of honour who cut the ribbon. They are the one’s who make the keynote speeches. They are the ones with entourages to protect them. It is as if women have been purposefully disappeared in the public gaze, hidden away in homes never to be seen let alone heard from. This is despite Kerala’s claims to being the most educated and gender equal state in the subcontinent. How that manifests though is not in the official public record. 

One office I went to consisted of around 30 young men, all working hard at the latest computers to produce graphic design on par with the Brooklyn-Berlin-Melbourne axis. And yet, the only woman who was there was the chechi. A chechi is an indispensable part of life here. She is the woman, usually older, who functions as a housekeeper, cleaner and cook for the household or office. Her role is to look after, in a very basic sense, the office workers. Chechi is there to cook lunch for people at the very least. The office does not have lunch together, but they eat what chechi puts in front of them. Today, it is fish curry, chickpea curry, red rice, pappad. There will be tea sometime later, when the men will smoke cigarettes and talk about last night’s cricket. The chechi though provides a cheap way to boost team spirit. They are the backbone that one does not see but must thank nonetheless. 

When I visited Facebook in Mumbai, they had professionalised the role of the chechi. Behind a buffet of steaming food, there was a line up of well-qualified men in toque blanche, white double-breasted jackets and houndstooth pants. They seemed positively hungry for recognition, the opposite of the demure, older women who cook here in Kochi. One might be tempted to argue that Facebook has brought this culture with them from Silicon Valley, and that might be true, just as they offer to pick up and drop off their workers in Mumbai now. But it meshes with a traditional Indian custom, which is personified in Kochi by the figure of the chechi. And so, just as women provide the bulk of staff and the men remain the figureheads talking themselves up, the role of the office chef is one that is dominated by men when it meets a certain level of status. Facebook is, of course, the smiling, thumbs up, branded corporate face of today’s world. And in this way, they are benign and impressive, but it might also displace a local idea of office culture that many take for granted. 

After all, people speak fondly of chechi. The role offers the possibility of an income for older women who might not have the same access to the economy in other ways, but the recompense for this is minor and relatively unappreciated. This is where the disparity between labour and capital makes itself known in India. And although Kerala is nowhere near as unequal as Bihar or Delhi, there are noticeable differences between classes here, reinforced by the brute economic factors that make labour cheap, because of its very surplus. When coupled with a resistance to organisation, brought about by an imaginative liberalism, one notices that the middle class here is thinner than in Australia. India, even as it begins to ‘emerge’, still has a long way to go to become a place that is more equal, more capable, and more aware of how it treats its citizens and what good they might do, not only for the boss but for the chechi also.