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The Mill Worker and the Coder
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Show notes
Mumbai, two working lives
Sushila started at a Parel textile mill in 1971 and stayed until the strikes closed it. Her grandson Rohan writes code for a bank in a Bandra Kurla Complex tower. They live in the same flat. They compare their working days in detail, from the commute to what a bad boss looks like, and find more in common than either expected.
- A mill shift in 1975, hour by hour
- A software sprint in 2026, hour by hour
- The 1982 strike and what it did to the family
- What Sushila thinks Rohan's job is, and the correction
- The one thing each would change about the other's life
With Hindi passages translated in the transcript. Rohan made the tea.
Transcript
Welcome back to Same Table, Different Century. I am Niamh Brennan, and this week we are in a flat in Mumbai, where a grandmother and a grandson share a kitchen and almost nothing else about their working lives. Sushila started at a textile mill in Parel in 1971 and worked there until the great strike shut the gates. Her grandson Rohan writes software for a bank in a glass tower in Bandra Kurla Complex. I asked them to walk each other through a single working day, hour by hour, and then to say what they think the other one is missing. Along the way we get the strike of 1982 as Sushila lived it, Rohan's gentle correction of what his grandmother believes he does all day, and the one thing each of them would change about the other's life. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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