The Beautiful and the Damned Page 2

  But such protests seemed marginal when compared to the celebration of call centres in business-friendly circles in both India and the West. The point was not that the work was bad or the salaries far lower than what Western workers might expect, the boosters said. It was how call centre work was creating a generation of Indian youth who were being 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 in the 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 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 were indeed 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 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 ordinary routine 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 abandoned by their husbands. Jabbar claimed that the organization, which had about 5,000 members, allowed the women to step beyond their traditional roles as victims. But it was also an organization of women centred around a male figure, a place where the women seemed to find a masculine presence that perhaps compensated for the fathers, husbands and sons absent in their lives.

  Many of the women had been raised as orthodox Hindus or Muslims, an upbringing they had to struggle with in order to venture beyond the neighbourhood and become members of Jabbar’s organization. Some of the Muslim women had got rid of their veils. Many of them remained religious without being orthodox, and only Feroza, who described herself as a ‘hard-core Muslim’, continued to have a running argument with Jabbar, who retorted, quietly but firmly, that he had no faith in any faith.

  Jabbar also claimed to have no faith in the West. He detested multinationals, especially Dow Chemicals, which had since acquired Union Carbide. But he also disliked organizations like Greenpeace that had tried to draw attention to the conditions in Bhopal so many years after the disaster. He did not take money from Western outfits, a position that set him at odds with a vastly more efficient organization called the Bhopal Group for Information and Action. He did not have a website for his organization, although even the local reporters begged him to set one up so that they could have easier access to information. He claimed, when I was first introduced to him, that he didn’t speak to Western reporters or to urban, upper-class Indians. He refused to speak in English, even though he seemed to have a working knowledge of the language. For a soft-spoken man of benign, even nondescript, appearance – short, pudgy, with a moustache and thick glasses – he was surprisingly truculent, and I came away from our initial meeting feeling rather disappointed.

  A writer visiting a new place and struggling with unfamiliar topics needs sources who are articulate, people who can point him to the key issues quickly and who can present the information in an organized way. And when the writer needs the stories of people’s lives, those narratives that insert recognizable, human shapes into large but abstract conflicts, he or she depends on people who have a sense of their own trajectories and who are willing to impose form on the chaos of their experiences and memories. Neither Jabbar nor his organization seemed to possess such qualities. When I followed my first visit with a few phone calls to Jabbar, I got some incoherent facts and figures and a half-hearted invitation to attend one of his weekly rallies. I began to see why Jabbar and his organization were unknown outside Bhopal, and why their names had never appeared in the well-researched Guardian and Nation articles I had gone through before coming to Bhopal.

  There were, after all, other sources of information in the city, like the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, where activists led me swiftly and efficiently to the principal aspects of the situation in Bhopal. From these people, working in a small office where humming computers and ringing telephones imparted a sense of efficiency and seriousness, I learned that activists from the Bhopal Group, along with people from Greenpeace, had broken into the factory to collect soil samples. These samples had then been analysed by a Boston-based environmental laboratory and found to be full of mercury and arsenic, and the Bhopal Group had the data and reports to show how the groundwater of all the slums around the factory remained contaminated with toxic waste.

  In comparison to the people working at the Bhopal Group, Jabbar seemed like a relic of the past, not really a character in a coherent story as much as a local demigod of the sort that proliferates in India. One looked at him in passing, and although a native guide might insist that this was a powerful deity, it was impossible as an outsider to enter that realm of local mythologies. It was impossible, in other words, to know anything about Jabbar and his activities without some kind of faith in him, and it was impossible to have that faith in him without the local knowledge.

  Nevertheless, one afternoon, I turned up to see the last thirty minutes of Jabbar’s Saturday rally. It was a time of the year when both Ramadan and Navratri (a Hindu festival) were being observed, and the audience was thinner than usual. About fifty women and a few men sat on the grass as Jabbar addressed them, standing in front of some ragged and stunted palm trees. He was less rambling as a public speaker, focused but intimate with his audience. When he ended his speech with a slogan, he didn’t raise his voice in a shout as Indian politicians tend to do. Instead, he said softly, ‘Naya Zamana …’ (‘The New Age …’), a phrase that the women closed emphatically and loudly by leaping to their feet and answering, ‘… ayega’ (‘… will come’). The slogan was repeated once – softer and on a downbeat – and even before the response had come, Jabbar had moved away, coiling up the wire trailing from his microphone.

  I liked the closing note. I
t was somehow more effective than a blood-curdling cry would have been. And I liked the way the women had given the slogan both body and soul, with Jabbar no more than a catalyst for their aspirations. I stayed on to talk to some of the women while Jabbar and other organizers ran back and forth among the small crowd. They were planning a trip to Delhi in the coming weeks to lobby the parliament, and it was important to spread the word to get an impressive turnout. At some point, Jabbar came up to me and said that it was a good time to talk, but he had to take care of a small task first.

  I accompanied Jabbar across the street to the Ladies’ Hospital. An ambulance packed with passengers stood in the driveway. I caught a glimpse of a woman in the back and what looked like a baby in swaddling clothes in her arms. ‘Go on to the house,’ Jabbar said. ‘Drive safely. I’ll come later.’ Then we walked back to the park, where Jabbar wheeled his Honda scooter out and asked me to climb on. During our ride through the jagged, amorphous quarters of the old city, I discovered that the woman in the ambulance was Jabbar’s wife and that she had given birth to a boy the night before. The activist had become a father, a first in his life, a fact that in its intimacy and domesticity seemed a little incongruous with the utopian, large-scale issues discussed in the park, but perhaps less incongruous than the fact that I, a stranger, was being taken to Jabbar’s house the same day his wife and son were coming home from the hospital.

  As Jabbar negotiated a path through the crowded marketplace, a furniture store caught his eye. He asked me to stay with the scooter while he went into the store, a room open to the street and packed with locally made furniture, most of it cobbled together out of plastic or cheap wood. What had attracted Jabbar’s attention was an infant cradle of pink plastic with a mosquito net attached to it. Jabbar bargained briefly, bought the contraption and handed it to me. The cradle had looked small in the store, but as I sat on the back seat of Jabbar’s scooter, riding up narrow alleyways and under hobbit-sized bridges, it began to assume gargantuan proportions. I had to shout at Jabbar to stop when I thought we were going to scrape against a wall. With frequent halts when I dismounted to cross particularly narrow stretches, we finally arrived at his house.