The Beautiful and the Damned Read Free

empowered by capitalism, people who had begun to break down the old restrictions of caste, class and gender, and who now exemplified the new India where men and women worked together late into the night and partied into the day, and who spent their money at the pubs, discotheques and shopping malls that had been brought to India by the same vigorous capitalism that had given them their jobs.
    The Indian call centres, some owned by multinationals and some by home-grown enterprises, had nevertheless become rather sensitive to any scrutiny of their business. Like much of corporate India, they had become so secretive that it was difficult for a journalist to freely observe work in call centres.
    The assignment from the
Guardian
meant that I had to put aside the Indian passport I had acquired, and the identity presented in its pages, and create a CV that offered a different identity, one more reasonable for an aspiring call centre worker. In order to take a job where I might have to change my name and accent and become a Western person, I first had to erase most traces of the West from my existing self. In order to become globalized through the call centre, I had to stop being globalized and become a provincial Indian, someone leaving Shillong for the first time to try his luck at the networked outsourcing offices of Noida, Gurgaon and Delhi. In the CV that I created, I retained my name and age, but all the other details were invented. I had already worked night shifts in Delhi while living in Munirka, but that had been at a newspaper. The schoolteacher I put down on my call centre CV was an alternate self, someone who had never left Shillong until now.
    These questions about who I was, and who the call centre workers were, seemed to be pieces of a larger puzzle about what India was in its new incarnation. In 1998, just as I was leaving the country, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party had won the national elections and formed a government in Delhi. It was a remarkable success for a party that, just ten years earlier, had possessed only two seats inthe parliament. As a college student, I had once run into one of the two BJP members of parliament. I had been waiting for a flight at the airport in Silchar, a small town in Assam, when I saw the portly, somewhat forlorn, figure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He too was waiting for the flight to Calcutta, having just finished a trip to the border town of Karimganj where he had gone to rouse local sentiments about illegal immigration into India by poor Muslims from Bangladesh.
    By 1998, however, Vajpayee had become the prime minister, a coronation celebrated by carrying out five nuclear tests in the desert sands of Rajasthan. Then, in 2002, the BJP government in the western state of Gujarat, headed by the business-friendly chief minister Narendra Modi, unleashed a pogrom on Muslims that left 2,000 people dead, thousands of women sexually assaulted and thousands of others displaced. On the economic front, Vajpayee’s government had continued the process of opening up its markets to foreign multinationals and investors while selling off state-owned assets cheaply to private businesses. An entire elite had been made even richer, while the middle class had become flush with cash, partaking happily of consumer goods like cars and mobile phones. But what was happening to the majority of people in India – the poor, the lower castes, women, Muslims and farmers – was a mystery. They were utterly invisible, edited out of the corporate and government buzz about India, and they resurfaced only when the BJP began its re-election bid in 2004, producing happy faces of the forgotten majority in a campaign it called ‘India Shining’.
    I went about trying to get work at call centres even as the BJP campaigned furiously in the background. In some sense, I was at the heart of India Shining, in the ‘sunrise’ industry of the call centres. I took an expensive class in call centre English at the