The Beautiful and the Damned Read Free Page A

British Council in Delhi, paying more for that brief course of a few weeks than I had for my entire state-subsidized higher education in India. I travelled to recruitment offices in Delhi and the outskirts, where I sat through tests and interviews that often took an entire day while trying to understand something of the lives of the youths who cycled in and out of the recruitment centres. On the surface, many of them wereindeed trendy and modern, wearing jeans and carrying mobile phones, but the lives they revealed to me were also filled with frustration and doubt. There was Leena, for instance, from the state of Sikkim, already tired of her job handling customer inquiries about mortgages and loans for an American bank. She had studied literature in college and wanted to become a schoolteacher until the higher salaries of the call centre industry drew her to Delhi. But the city life had turned out to offer her little of the freedom she had expected. She shared a room with five other women at the YWCA hostel, and most of her time was taken up by a job that she liked less and less.
    ‘The customers get irate,’ she told me. ‘Their transactions often get messed up, and it’s my job to pacify them. I understand that they’re upset, but they start calling me names, and then it gets really difficult.’
    My most extended interaction with call centre workers came when I got a job for HCL BPO, an Indian outsourcing firm that had an office in Noida for handling customer service calls for BT. Over the next two weeks, including one week of training, the days blended into each other. The shifts were nine hours long, and with travel time added in, the job consumed twelve to thirteen hours a day. My mornings began with the honking of the company van outside the apartment I was staying in and they ended around midnight with a similar van depositing me home after the driver, in order to avoid having his monthly salary of 4,000 rupees docked for falling behind schedule, had sped through red lights at eighty kilometres an hour. As for the job itself, that involved taking calls from angry British customers who wanted to cancel their BT Internet accounts, trying to convince them to stay on, first by telling them how inconvenient it would be for them to cancel (‘Madam, you will lose your BT email address. What if people try to get in touch with you at that address?’) and moving up gradually to offering free technical support or a free month of service.
    When on the phone with their British customers, my colleagues were invariably polite, murmuring into their headsets in their idiosyncratic renditions of the Northern Irish accent our trainers had all brought back with them from the BT facility in Belfast. In real life,however, they were a competing bunch of neuroses and afflictions, with an incredibly low tolerance for difference of any kind. There was Pradeep, a soft-spoken, intelligent man who was nevertheless convinced that he would never marry a woman who had worked at a call centre because she was bound to be promiscuous. Swati, a plump woman whose husband also worked at a call centre, agreed. It was hard not to feel sympathy for Swati, who had trouble with her English and was worried about talking to British customers, especially those ‘Wellish’ people who insisted on speaking in ‘Wellish’. And yet she had the habit of making disparaging comments about Muslims, especially to Feroze, one of the men who led us in a training session and whose English was flawless. The only one among my colleagues who disagreed with these common views was Alok, a discontented man with an engineering degree. I ran into him one afternoon during a break. He approached me in a haze of marijuana smoke.
    ‘This call centre work is not a career,’ he said, offering me a drag of his reefer along with his wisdom. ‘If I start working as an engineer, I’ll get half of what I make right now. But in five years, I’ll be making more money and have a