The Beautiful and the Damned Read Free Page B

real job. A friend of mine, a civil engineer, began a couple of years ago with a salary of only five thousand rupees. Now, he’s part of the Delhi metro construction project. He’s doing something with his life.’
    Unlike the accounts in the media, most people in the call centre didn’t seem to think they were doing anything with their life. They were trapped in the here and now, and the new work opportunities brought by globalization had given these lower-middle-class youths as much of a sense of vulnerability as of empowerment. They went in and out of the call centre jobs, abandoning them for other work when the long, late-night hours became too oppressive, returning to the call centres when the other jobs they had taken seemed not to offer enough money. They might have been the most visible face of India Shining, but their inner lives, invisible to the world, showed a more complex reality where uncertainty and stasis had as great an influence as the superficial mobility and modernity of their jobs.
    By the time I quit my job at the call centre, it seemed to me that the sunrise industry was a rather fake world, dressing up its ordinaryroutine work in the tinsel of youthfulness. From the Internet terminals scattered along the passageways, to the food courts, the recreation rooms with pool tables and the pictures of workers with American flags painted on their faces, the bigger outsourcing offices gave the impression that they were Western college campuses. But there wasn’t much freedom in these outposts of the free world, with their sanctioned fifteen-minute bathroom breaks for every four hours of work. They were places where along with the monotony and stress of the work, the modernity of India became an ambiguous phenomenon rather than a marker of irreversible progress. It seemed that I was not the only one there with a fake identity.
    In April 2004, the BJP, in spite of its vigorous India Shining campaign, lost the elections. A few months later, I found myself in the city of Bhopal, in central India, pursuing a forgotten story. I was there to write a piece on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that happened on the night of 2 December 1984, when a pesticide factory run by the American multinational Union Carbide spewed out toxic fumes and killed at least 3,000 people in twenty-four hours. In the two decades since then, the death toll had reached at least 20,000, while another 100,000 people were estimated by Amnesty International to be suffering ‘chronic and debilitating’ illnesses caused by the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas that had leaked out from the factory.
    When I arrived in Bhopal in November, I was told that I should meet a man called Abdul Jabbar. Even though no one outside the city had heard of him, he had a reputation in Bhopal as someone who had done the most for victims of the Union Carbide disaster. He ran an organization for women widowed and rendered destitute by the disaster, working from a converted industrial shed in the old quarter of the city. It was a shoddily run place in many ways, with grimy toilets, battered sewing machines, a telephone that was kept, oddly enough, in the kitchen, photographs of Gandhi and lesser-known Indian radicals, an office overflowing with paper, and a verandah where a display case contained hideous stuffed toys that stared at visitors with glassy eyes.
    From this strange base quartering an organization with a name that came across as unwieldy whether in full form, acronym or in translation (the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan or BGP-MUS or Bhopal Gas-Affected Women’s Enterprise Organization), Jabbar and the women sallied out occasionally to picket government officials, demanding the compensation money that had been promised but not delivered twenty years after the event.
    The women were mostly working class and usually illiterate. The older ones had lost their husbands in the disaster or its aftermath, while some of the younger ones had been