What does preferring to keep servants do to us Indians? It does three things. Before we start on those I would like to qualify that word ‘preferring’ because it could be argued that we only keep servants because of economic reasons. The evidence doesn’t show that. Even Indians with modest incomes keep them because physical work, specifically cleaning, is looked down upon in our culture. We could pretend otherwise but I don’t want to.

The first thing servanting (I am coining this word) does is dehumanise us. Those of us who keep servants grow up being accustomed to rules that are barbaric. Those rules which all who are reading this are familiar with and practice. What our servants may eat, when they may eat, what they may eat out of. Where they may sit (actually mostly where they may not) and where they may accompany us and how. If we were asked to individually question each of these rules we would be appalled by them because we are all essentially moral creatures. But collectively these rules have become normalised and acceptable. Dehumanise means to deprive and deny someone of their human-ness. That is a pretty good definition of what we do and why we do it. The practice of servanting also dehumanises your servant. I think you should figure out how.

The second thing it does is perpetuate, extend, solidify and validate our caste hierarchy. Indians are condemned by birth. There is almost no chance of escaping your class here because the middle class is uninterested in supporting public expenditure on education and health. It demands (and gets) bullet trains, smart cities and more fighter planes. The poor will take care of themselves: our needs come first. I was invited to speak to the students of one of Bangalore’s elite schools last year. I spoke about the right to education, but the kids and their parents were unified in insisting that they would not tolerate reservations that brought the poor into their institution. How many of the students gathered in the hall were either scheduled caste or scheduled tribe I asked. None.

Servanting is slavery by another name. We could defend ourselves by saying they are not shackled but this is not really material. If they leave us where will they go? If not us they must serve another.

The third thing it does is the one I have been thinking about most in these days when Tesla has become the highest valued automobile manufacturer in the United States over General Motors and Ford. Forty years ago, when I first began reading newspapers, some used car notices in the Times of India’s classifieds would emphasise the line ‘Parsi owned’.

It meant that the machine was in good condition because it was owned by an individual who personally knew how it worked and how to maintain it. This was sufficient to ensure a premium in India. Why? The answer is obvious and again I will leave it for you to ponder why cars were not advertised as ‘Hindu owned’ or ‘Patel owned’.

What does it do to an entire culture and its millions of inmates when they deny themselves the experience of working creatively with their hands? For generations, people like us have had no experience of any real physical work.

Making tools, fixing things, designing things. We have no instinct for these and this is not new. The writer UR Ananthamurthy agreed with this when we discussed it a few months before his death. He said this didn’t apply to lower castes, and he’s right. But the problem is that the rest of us, who have access to a quality education, don’t kick on to become productive inventors.

No Tesla can emerge from a country whose boys have no idea and little interest in how engines work. Or how to make a better solar panel. That spark of curiosity that all of us humans are born with is snuffed out and strangled in middle class India by a culture where it is eccentric to do your own fixing and gardening. We are removed from machines and we are removed from nature. We are a sixth of humanity and contribute little or nothing to its furtherment. Is that a pressing problem? Of course not. We’ll build that temple and clean the Ganga (actually the servants will clean the Ganga).

Gandhi saw the dangers of servanting when he returned from South Africa and tried (and failed) to teach middle class Indians to return to working with their hands: spin, clean and all the rest of it. After him there has been no further interest in this.

There is no intellectual or religious resistance to this from within. I wish Hindutva would address it, but its proponents are satisfied so long as we sort out the ‘enemy’ within, no matter what we continue to do to ourselves in every other way.