Chetan Bhagat’s “One Night at the Call Center” is India’s biggest best seller. The comic adventures of six people working in an outsourced customer service facility, the novel has a more serious point behind the Bollywood balderdash: Call centers not only kill the souls of India’s youth, but also the future of India itself.
The book is targeted at India’s 18-to-25 MTV demographic. Filled with zingy one-liners and farcical situations, “One Night at the Call Center” is written in the breezy, conversational style and attitude of a generation used to communicating by SMS (the short message service for mobile phones) and text messaging. That’s also the group likely to be among the more than 700,000 people employed in the rapidly expanding industry that already contributes $17 billion a year to India’s economy.
The story indeed covers what happens to the friends during one night shift at a call center. Characterization is shallow, if not flat, and each character is a representative type that might be found employed at such a place. Five of them are even under 30.
The sitcom setup serves the shaggy-dog tale of a plot well. The friends, kind of an elite unit, save the center from closing down with a mad scheme to scare their dim-witted American customers into making more calls for help with the application of an Microsoft Word “Easter Egg.” Elsewhere, certain death is averted by the literal deus ex machina of a phone call from God, which saves not only their lives, but also their souls. And, of course, a manager who talks only in management doublespeak gets his comeuppance.
As one might infer from the plot, a lot of the book’s comedy and popularity depends upon easy, by-the-numbers anti-Americanism. The Americans who call the center are all stupid and loudmouthed, sometimes drunk, more often bigoted. The Indians in the call center are trained to handle such customers by being told such things as: “Americans are dumb, just accept it.” One training bon mot that Bhagat swears is true is the agents are told that a 10-year-old Indian is as bright as, if not brighter than, a 35-year-old American.
Bhagat has issues with what he calls the high pedestal on which America has been placed. He maintains he is just telling the youth of India the reality of the United States and then they can make up their own minds.
More important for us is the attention Bhagat’s book has drawn to outsourced call centers. He likens the working conditions to a sweatshop. A recent government report, released about the same time as “One Night at the Call Center,” was less kind. The V.V. Giri National Labour Institute Report equated call centers to Roman slave galleys. One result is the beginnings of a trade union for call center workers.
Bhagat feels India should develop productive employment of its own rather than resorting to stopgap arrangements like outsourcing, which only create temporary growth.
His thesis that such work is demeaning and wastes the talents of an entire generation is something Bhagat knows well. He has a day job as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong.
Network
