Everything comes with a Service

The service sector in India is huge. No matter which task, a huge number of people earn their living by doing your work for you.

You don't want to go grocery shopping? Simply order by app and receive all your daily necessities at your doorstep in 15 minutes. Want a driver for your car? No problem, as we can confirm. Need your laundry dry-cleaned? For sure, and picked up from home and delivered again, of course.

The examples go on and on: The doorman at the hotel, security services at the mall entrance, maids, cooks, and so on and so forth...

This was quite a change for us. One could say that people in Germany are starving for good customer service while in India you almost get handed too many service providers on a silver platter. Both countries are practically the opposite of each other.

So correspondingly it felt unfamiliar - even unpleasant - for us at the beginning to be able to fall back on an "army of employees", meaning maid and driver as well as weekly gardener service. "Isn't that out of touch and somehow wrong?" we asked ourselves.

But we quickly learned from our Indian neighbors that this is completely normal. In the middle class, practically everyone has at least one maid. In fact, we were asked whether we really wanted to do without a cook!

As nice as it is to have help in everyday life: We can't and don't want to let things out of our hands completely. There are various reasons for this.

On the one hand, of course, we're not above emptying the dishwasher ourselves. In all honesty, there is also a certain German obsession with detail when it comes to how things should be done so you see for the finishing touch yourself (polishing taps is less common in India ;-)).

Last but not least, constantly relying on service providers, (waiting for) their availability and (hoping for) their expertise also makes you dependent. For example, we bought and planted the flowers and plants for our balcony ourselves. This is completely normal in Germany, but the exception in India - as the gardeners' wide eyes showed when they suddenly saw the splendor of our greenery.

In India, we are constantly surrounded by people who make our everyday life easier in the apartment. What does our  appartement actually look like, you ask?

We cordially invite you to Our Home in Bangalore. Read the article now.