Is Our Economy Ready For ‘Anything From Home'?

There is no surprise anymore in claiming that there’s no need to leave home often. In a coCovid world, I wake up to groceries and a newspaper at my doorstep before I reach the office through a laptop. After a meeting on Zoom, I browse for headphones on Amazon and perhaps a shirt on Instagram. People in the house range from virtually attending school to attending a satsang. Later, my barber prepares my living room for my monthly trim and cleans up after it, following which, my family and I join my friends via tele-party for a movie night. For a certain class, the co-Covid world order means XFHAnything from Home.

- Viiveck Verma

Private-sector services, unlike the public sector, have quickly advertised themselves as providing customers with XFH.

But this system has its problems. Like most things in the present economy, XFH works for one section of society at the expense of another. For some, XFH means receiving all services at home; for others, it means delivering these services to other people’s homes. The latter are the millions ensuring that our food reaches the market, the service sector workers called for massages and pedicures, the safai karamcharis, construction workers, policemen and countless others whose work cannot exist in the home. XFH is the privilege of a small class while providing it is the bread-and-butter of other classes.