India Finds Its Calling

One Night @ the Call Center
By Chetan Bhagat
291 pages, New Delhi:
Rupa & Co., 2005 (in English)

If you’re an American living in New York and your computer crashes, your dishwasher malfunctions, or you’re overdue on your credit card payments, chances are good that your call for help will be answered by a bright, young twentysomething Indian graduate in New Delhi with a headset, a flickering monitor, and a fake American accent.

To many, the call center has become the symbol of India’s rapidly globalizing economy. While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic population of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases. They feign familiarity with a culture and climate they’ve never experienced, earn salaries that their elders couldn’t have imagined (but still a fraction of what an American would make), and enjoy a lifestyle that’s a cocktail of premature affluence and ersatz Westernization. It’s a subculture that merits closer examination, and in Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Center, a breezy bestseller that has taken middle-class India by storm, the Samuel Johnsons of this brave new world have found their Boswell.

For all its billion-strong population, only 61 percent of whom can officially read, India is hardly commercially viable territory for the workaday novelist. The typical Indian "bestseller" sells between 3,000 and 5,000 copies; a true success is one that remains in print for years, with reprints of 2,000 copies or so every nine or 12 months. In this modest market, One Night @ the Call Center reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies in the first few months after its publication, and the demand shows no sign of abating. Bhagat, a 31-year-old whiz kid with degrees from two of India’s most prestigious educational institutions — a bachelor’s in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management — works as a banker for Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong and dabbles in didactic fiction in his spare time. His first novel, Five Point Someone, a tale of three college friends subtitled "What not to do at IIT," sold almost as well when it was released in 2004. Bhagat has a talent for tapping into the zeitgeist; that he is not much older than the people he writes about makes him a particularly credible portrayer of their world.

Written in a simple, unpretentious, and unadorned style, One Night @ the Call Center tells the story of six colleagues at a New Delhi call center on one dramatic night when their lives all but fall apart and their existential crises are resolved literally through divine intervention (in the form of a phone call from God). It isn’t great literature. Serious critics will no doubt quibble with the two-dimensional characterization, the pedestrian prose, the plot’s contrived deus ex machina, and the author’s hokey spiritualism. But none of that matters.

Bhagat’s tone is pitch-perfect, his observer’s eye keenly focused on nuance and detail. Verisimilitude is all: The first two thirds of the novel evokes, indeed reproduces, the way the young call center workers think, talk, eat, drink, date, dress, and behave. "My English is not that great," says the narrator, Shyam Mehra (or "Sam Marcy" to his call center customers). "So, if you are looking for something posh and highbrow, then I’d suggest you read another book which has some big many-syllable words. I know only one big, many-syllable word, and I hate that word — ‘management.’"

Management, in the form of the odious middle manager Bakshi — busy sucking up to his bosses in Boston while taking credit for the work of Shyam and his colleague Varun ("Victor" at the call center, "Vroom" to his friends, because of his obsession with cars) — is ignorant, uncaring, manipulative, and on the verge of firing hard-working staff in the name of "right-sizing." Shyam, meanwhile, is trying to get over his breakup with Priyanka, a pretty coworker whose mother has coerced her into agreeing to an arranged marriage with a Seattle-based Microsoft engineer who is what is known as an NRI, or "Non-Resident Indian." Their dates in New Delhi’s yuppiest hangouts, recalled in a few flashbacks, are poignantly true to life, as is Shyam’s resentment of the NRI, seen as having achieved the American Dream while Shyam is only living a pale facsimile of it.

Rounding out the officemates are Esha Singh ("Eliza Singer"), who desperately strives to become a professional model; Radhika Jha ("Regina Jones"), who struggles to fulfill the duties of an Indian wife, cooking three meals a day and caring for a demanding mother-in-law while working all night at the call center; and an older ex-soldier known as "Military Uncle," who was thrown out of his home after a clash with his daughter-in-law. The interactions among the six make for highly entertaining reading — until the novel devolves into a screed against their profession.

For Bhagat, it turns out, doesn’t like call centers. He sees them as soul-destroying sweatshops, soaking up the talents and energies of young Indians who could and should be doing better for themselves and their country. The book’s denouement inveighs against young Indians wasting their time catering to the unreasonable and petty demands of American customers — customers so stupid that an instructor teaches call center trainees the formula "10=35": "Remember, a 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s. … Americans are dumb, just accept it. I don’t want anyone losing their cool during the calls."

"Look at our country," Vroom declares. "We are still so behind these Americans. Even when we know we are no less than them…. We should be building roads, power plants, airports, phone networks and metro trains…. And if the government moves its rear-end and does that, the young people in this country will find [real] jobs." As Vroom puts it in the novel’s climactic scene: "An entire generation up all night, providing crutches for the white morons to run their lives. And then big companies come and convince us with their advertising to value crap we don’t need, do jobs we hate so that we can buy [their] stuff…. We have just been reduced to a high-spending demographic … while bad bosses and stupid Americans suck the lifeblood out of our country’s most productive generation."

Strong stuff, especially coming from an expat banker. It is safe to assume, though, that if One Night @ the Call Center has struck a chord with India’s young — and it clearly has — it is more for its depiction than its politics, its diagnosis rather than its prescription. Some 700,000 Indians, many like the characters Bhagat depicts, work in the "business process outsourcing" and information technology industries, which contribute an estimated $17 billion to the burgeoning Indian economy. "They toss their loose change at us," Vroom says of the American companies. Yet call centers are multiplying, and the demand for skilled "agents" has driven salaries up to ever more attractive levels. Although many may suffer the angst this novel so effectively conveys, most see a job in a call center as a passport to a better life, one offering more possibilities and choices than were imaginable to the previous generation. These young Indians may keep unsocial hours, neglect their family obligations, drink excessive cocktails with names like "Long Island Iced Tea," and date each other with a casualness that horrifies their parents. But they are part of a social and economic revolution that is enriching and transforming India, mostly for the better. Chetan Bhagat may not entirely approve, but it’s this new India that’s buying his book.