The new labour

There's a house being built next door for the last many years. Every now and then there's a sudden flurry of activity, and then silence again.

One morning as I'm drinking a cup coffee on the veranda I see a small group of young boys and girls enter the half-built house, chattering loudly in Konkani. They look like college-going youth in any small town. The boys slouch in with satchels on their back. They have slicked-back hair and a rather jaunty air. The girls are smart in salwar-kurtas. One girl has white flowers in her hair.

A while later I realise they are manual labourers. They go to and fro in the hot sun, carrying heavy blocks of laterite on their heads. Some are emptying bags of cement and scraping together a mixture with water and sand. Others are transporting the mixture to the mason. The boys have changed into old t-shirts while the girls wear long white coats rather like a doctor's over their clothes. It's hard work, sweaty and dirty. They don't look sweaty or dirty. All day I can hear them laughing and talking as they work. They tease each other, they sing. During the lunch break, after eating rice from the tiffin that each carries, they lie down in the shade cast by a large cashew tree. The girl with the flowers pulls out a compact mirror and examines her face. Another combs her hair.

When they leave in the evening it's hard to believe they've been doing hard labour all day in the hot sun. Each has had a wash. They look like college students going home after a day spent sitting in a lecture hall and making fun of the teacher.

I know for sure that these migrants from Karnataka won't be going home to some hovel, as they would if they were labourers in a big city. I asked a mason once what they did on a Sunday. 'Eat chicken and watch TV,' he told me.

They are such a contrast to the wretched labour you see in cities that I wonder: Is this a sign of the New Shining India? Or is it just Goa not conforming, as usual, to the Indian stereotype?

Singing while you slave?