Why do we need an app to find the perfect household help?

We have apps for every need these days —those that tracks our food and grocery deliveries, tell us how fast our anxious heart is beating, how many hours of sleep or how many litres of water we need to drink in a day, those that help us upskill or reskill, and then there are the ones that claim can find us love!

Yes, I agree that it is a delirious idea — but when you are 36 years old and realize you end up conversing with yourself most of the times, you think, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a partner with whom you can have discussions. You find yourself looking for the camaraderie from your youth, when you had the time to ponder, but, alas, here you are - Like me. With bills to pay while maintaining sanity on a day-to-day basis and dealing with a world that is ruthlessly mean about you being single!

The judgment is just biblical — and you alone are held responsible for not being able to hold on to a relationship. You can be as successful as you want but if you are a single girl in her mid-late 30s — it is assumed that YOU are the Problem with a capital P. I just never thought I’d have to navigate the judgment stares while trying to understand and figure my future investment plans. And as I struggle to grow my money and find someone, there’s those tech-men (you know the colleges I refer to) who came up various apps to find singles a perfect match.

Fantastic, but herein lies the problem: you cannot find love based on an algorithm, and you cannot find someone who will choose you based on machine learning. Love is a very small part in the bigger picture called choice. We all make choices every single day — some we stick to, thus forming our habits, and some we try and change over time.

The expansion of the digital space cannot help in ceasing the void that exists within us. It simply cannot. It is mere fantasy as that someone who digitally knows you based on three questions, religious sentiments and sexual preference will stick around for you as your ‘someone’. It is nothing short of a Hollywood rom-com plot and unfortunately, the reality is more complex than just sizzling chemistry. Companionship, if I can call it so, is a slow brewing process, a time-investment risky process with no return guaranteed, and no offer document to read and verify. One needs conversations, from the serious to the mundane; to those endless cups of caffeine; those lingering moments; to situations you never thought you’d encounter. You’re searching for something so primal, yet basic —how can a machine do that for you?

What the machine can do is find you compatible people based on algorithms to do the above steps with but ultimately, you need to do what’s called ‘adulting’ - You need to look after yourself, do self-care, look splendid, eat well and also have enough money in your account. If not, there’s another judgement awaiting — the ‘gold digger’ tag.

I broke up my day to understand what exactly I do in my 24 hours: 16 hours reserved for brain work, a bit of exercise to keep the body in shape, update knowledge to keep my mind active, be there for friends, family and their friends, and also try and find someone who you can introduce to your world of people as your better half. Let’s not forget the mundane tasks of sleeping, eating and cooking in the middle of all the above.

Thus, to break down the basics, I realized I needed a person who could cook decent meals for me, hear me chatter to myself, and keep my space in order when I’m being a workaholic. So, what I really needed was the perfect household help.

But here is the thing, the perfect help is one of the most difficult things to come by. To find a person who knows your schedule, s your food type, your palate, and who helps you maintain the standard of clean you desire, is simply hard. It gets harder for someone like me who moves every two years from place to place. It’s no wonder matriarchs in Indian homes are more fond and partial to their household helps than own flesh and blood.

Household help is an essential need for any one of us who is trying to keep the balance among earning a living, living up to the expectations of the various judgement clubs, and trying to be your person. Hence, I respectfully believe that rather than adding disappointments to our long list of adult life failures in the guise of partner hunting, how about someone creating an app that finds the perfect help?

And if you are a tech guy reading this, you owe me royalty for floating this idea