07.20.07
Bytes Breed Rats In India
In the NY Times today is a story about rats in need of a novel. My guess is that the author of the segment, Anand Giridharadas, is already writing it.
MUMBAI, India, July 19 — Behram Harda was a dancer in the Bollywood films of the 1970s, gracing the screen with his twist and his cha-cha.
Then he became a rodent assassin.
Today, in the sprawling B Ward of this teeming, filthy, exhilarating city, Mr. Harda is admired by his colleagues as the last of the great Mumbai rat catchers. His is a dying breed in a city whose dreams of being rat-free recede year by year.
The rat catchers can snag buckets full of rats in minutes, which they then kill in various gruesome ways, the worst being to grab the rat by its tail and beat its brains out on the ground. But then we’re talking about rats that might be carrying bubonic plague, not cuddly squirrels, beady-eyed raccoons or Remy, le rat de Ratatouille, who wants to be a master chef.
Unfortunately for Mubai, the number of rat catchers is decreasing because of better jobs, especially in call centers and software firms built from bytes:
But Mr. Harda is an Indian Sisyphus. When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.
Private-sector jobs in call centers and software firms beckon, and the government struggles to attract men of Mr. Harda’s caliber. Many rat-catching posts lie vacant. Meanwhile, Mumbai has metastasized from a genteel city of a few million into a grimy megalopolis of 17 million. More than half of the population lives in shanties surrounded by garbage — and, consequently, by rats.
So if you’re looking for a job in India that is more about spirited scurrying about than a lot of heavy lifting . . .