Urban Short - Maidservant

This film is an inclusive narrative of a city in transition. This film is a polycentric journey to revisit the impressions of iconic spaces that represent various classes in the city. Every growing city with its high rises and sky scrapper gets balanced with its adjoining urban poverty. The interdependency of these two spaces has grown to be stronger and blurred with tides of urbanization and globalization. The slum or the adjoining urban poverty is that unintended city, the city that was never a part of the master plan but was always implicit in it. The official city cannot survive without its unintended self but cannot own that self either.
This other city consists of a huge mass of technically discarded obsolete citizens that provide the energy and the cheap labor that is literally the engine of civic life. This engine here the domestic maids, women, is the subject of this film. The previous vulnerability that existed while India was a third world country now exists no more. The domestic maids used to remain a kind of embarrassment to the rest of urban breathing. With tides of globalization and consumerism, these parts of population are no more passive objects or mere tools in economic map of a city. With the change of social, economic and political contours, the domestic maids have become conscious of their position in society and have understood that they play a very important role in shaping the urban middle class existence. With their exposition to the urban-industrial world, media network that supports the global connection and pan-Indian homogeneity, the domestic maids are now demanding to give a structural industrial makeover to their profession with the help of International labor law. But the problem lies in the fact that the global & commercial tides could not change the emotive response of this urban consciousness. The family value system that still rules the domestic space of an Indian household and does not allow the professional structure of this ‘domestic help’. India is no more a very poor country, and its rising GDP has penetrated into the cultural consciousness of its citizens. But, could this change the cultural behaviour of the modern Indian minds? Can the awareness in all the civic rights override the moral value system of the family or deluge the emotional interdependencies of two women (the employer and employed in household domestic structure) from two different classes? The film exposes this dilemma embedded in the pulse of every Indian city with its modern economic climb.