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Shyam
Mehra, 26, is a self-professed loser in New Delhi. When
he dons a telephone headset each night, though, he
becomes Sam Marcy, a polite troubleshooter for Americans
angered by their home appliances.
Shyam,
his ex-girlfriend and other customer-service agents are
all stuck in dead-end jobs at the Connexions call
center, where their incompetent, jargon-spouting boss
may soon get everyone fired.
So goes
the plot in One Night @ the Call Center, the
partly funny, partly preachy second novel of Chetan
Bhagat, who spends his days at Deutsche Bank AG in
Hong Kong investing in distressed Asian companies.
Business
has fallen off at Connexions, jobs are getting axed and
the workers are all struggling with personal setbacks.
Shyam has been denied a promotion. His old flame has
agreed to an arranged marriage. Coworker Vroom detests
the work, while Esha yearns to be a model.
Their
troubles come to a head on Thanksgiving Day, when
customers across the US are calling to complain about
ovens that are too small for extra-large turkeys. In an
over-the-top climax, a call from God Himself saves the
day. Like everyone else in the book, the Almighty is
rabidly anti-American.
“Americans may have many things, but they are not the
happiest people on earth by any stretch,” is the divine
verdict. “Many of them have serious issues in the head.
Issues only call center agents know about.”
Misspent
youth
An
instant bestseller in
India,
where it has sold 500,000 copies since it was published
in October 2005, the book is now available in the US and
UK. (In the US edition, God refrains from voicing unkind
opinions about Americans.)
Ian
McEwan it’s not. Yet what counts here is Bhagat’s
message, not his narrative skill. Call centers, in his
view, are bad for India because they squander the
country’s youth, which ought to be doing something more
meaningful, like building roads and power plants.
More
than 400,000 people work in Indian call centers. If the
industry keeps growing at its current pace, it will have
as many workers in five years as Indian Railways, the
country’s biggest employer.
For
liberal-arts graduates, a job as a customer-service
agent is an easy route to earning the $300 a month they
need for a three-pizzas-a-week lifestyle. Yet these jobs
are not seen as a mainstream career option. At many call
centers, it’s common for two out of five employees to
quit each year. Attrition rates at badly run centers run
as high as 100 percent.
Many of
the young agents loathe the surveillance, which would
put a high-security prison to shame. Some can’t get used
to abusive customers; others fail to adjust to working
at nights.
Modern
slaves
Just as
Bhagat’s book was hitting the stalls in India, a
government-supported think tank chimed in, comparing
conditions in some call centers to “Roman slave ships.”
Labor-rights activists seized the chance.
The
“laborers of the information age,” M.K. Pandhe,
president of the left-wing Center of Indian Trade
Unions, said in an interview to Web site Rediff.com,
“toil long hours, they work at night, and some of them
still get meager salaries.”
Bhagat
says that exposing the “dark undertones” of the
call-center business wasn’t his main focus. “ON@TCC is
pure entertainment,” the novelist says on his Web site.
Perhaps.
Yet a somber message comes through from characters like
Vroom, who lays out the political premise of the book in
a drunken rant: Americans are bad because they send
their dreary, mind-numbing work overseas. The government
of India is awful because it can’t—or won’t—create
better jobs for its youth. And the seductive culture of
consumption is making young, overqualified Indians
accept meaningless jobs just so they can go to
discotheques and lounge bars and sip Long Island Tea.
It’s
this part of the book that doesn’t work. However hard he
tries, Bhagat can’t make us feel much sympathy for these
youngsters, who largely come across as spoiled brats.
India
has “an entire generation up all night,” Vroom says
theatrically, doing jobs “we hate.”
--Bloomberg |
