My Summer at an Indian Call Center
m.motherjones.com
m.motherjones.com
Yeah but it sure cuts down on malnutrition. The above paragraphs is a shibboleth for well-off far lefties. And boy does reading it piss me off. What a way to miss the forest for the trees!
This article started out great but then slowly started to go bad. Our plucky western kid, son of doctors, with a liberal arts education freely admits he just can't quite grasp the basic geography of Australia.
If that was a badly done attempt to compliment the Indians, good. Badly written, but good intent. If it was an honest admission of his... jeez is this what liberal education does to a son of two doctors!?
The writer also goes the extra mile by sharing a bed with a stranger, but all he seems to get out of it is a few sentences mentioning that he shared a bed with a stranger, and this one time the power went out. Not exactly many deep insights form all this self imposed hardship. Or as the kids say these days, cool story bro.
Lastly, the author spends a lot of time writing about one depressed guy.
There was some good stuff, globalization, the changes in Indian society, and it could have been a great article. But instead it seems to be just a vague money doesn't bring happiness story, also westernization is kind of sucky. You don't say.
Any opinion you attribute to the author is most likely something you are imagining based on your own opinions.
Just like anything in reason.org is bound to have a certain slant, things in Mother Jones are not going to get published if they don't have their own slant.
> Any opinion you attribute to the author is most likely something you are imagining based on your own opinions.
The same phrase he mentioned popped out at me too, and if you look at it, it carries a lot of opinion:
"Free-market cheerleaders, conflating"
First of all, "cheerleaders" certainly contains a sense of someone in favor of something in a sort of rah-rah, go-team way that is not entirely positive. "Conflating" means: "they're mistaken".
That said, yeah, it's mostly his experiences, but it's sprinkled with stuff to make it "on-message" with where it's published.
India is a big and complicated place, and there is a lot to think about its economic development. Are big foreign companies favored over small and/or local ones? Why, what kind of dynamic is at play here?
How does the new economic power of women affect the sex selection of infants?
There's just two examples, right of the top of my head, that I think (hope!) would be of interest to the hard core mother jones readers.
But that's not where this goes, instead we get the shallow, almost caricaturish, money isn't everything undertone. Mixed with not enough money undertone, the workers should be getting paid more, they work 30+ hours shifts and still have to have bunk mates. All this mixed with, life sure can be complicated in this modern ever changing world.
And none of these issues are explored in depth, it's just "doesn't it suck how little they are paid, doesn't it suck that money doesn't make you happy, hey look a Marxists!"
I guess I would mind "on-message" editorializing a lot less, if it was part of a really good article. And what's most disturbing is this sense I get that maybe there could have been a much better article, but then it wouldn't have been on message, and to make it on message some bad things had to be done to the writing.
// It was an article not a book. Isn't the purpose to raise in your mind these sorts of questions? He presents his experience to enlarge your outlook and enable you to address such questions in a more informed way. He's surely not attempting to offer an exhaustive insight into Indian culture just a snapshot from a long visit.
That's exactly the point!
The big win here is gaining one up on the basic necessities of survival.
The fact that ennui is unaffected well sure that's a downside, money is not the same as happiness, but it sure beats starving or freezing to death.
Basic necessities of life vs ennui. If you mention both in the same sentence in an attempt to even out the benefits from steady work, well then you're a dick.
Having said that, this is a great read. What worries me about India is that we are producing a generation whose sole competency is in answering phone calls and faking who they are and the only selling point is that they are cheaper labor than the western workers. This isn't a sustainable in longer term. We are bound to find labor markets that are cheaper (we already are) or business processes that are more efficient (we already are). For a sustained development India needs to ramp up her infrastructure and invest in her people in a way which produces value rather than ups elling her people cheaply. Outsourcing should just be a stepping stone to industries that are more valuable.
India has achieved great strides in other industries in recent years (steel, coal, automobile, textile, agriculture, crafts, jewellery etc.) which should be highlighted and encouraged. Enough of this call-center nonsense.
In any case, it is hardly insignificant (or nonsense).
The Indian IT industry is worth $60-75 billion at present. Remember, it's the whole IT industry. BPO sector hardly touches even $20 billion. Given its value, the hype it has earned for more than a decade is ridiculous and unjustified.
India has a huge number of young people who may not be able to join the IT companies, manufacturing industries, or the booming private financial sector because they may not have the education, inclination or aptitude to do so.
Call centers, much reviled as they are, provide an avenue for hundreds of thousands of people to hold down a well paying, stable job. I think the author's experience there is fairly typical, but there is a crucial difference in perception.
What the author finds depressing (or pointless) is actually a gateway to a "middle class" life for many thousands of people. I am sure if the author went back in time to Michigan in the 20s, he would have similar things to say about workers on the automobile assembly lines. But while the great American manufacturing boom of the early 20th century is celebrated as a gateway to prosperity, a fairly similar thing happening in India is looked upon with a somewhat negative bias.
My 70 year old Indian grandmother was a school teacher. She had five daughters and all of them became teachers or professors. None of them spent their childhood in cities.
Yes. There were several statements that were plain false, and I picked that one because I had proof-of-falsehood.
>However, the BPO era has added a significant number of jobs of questionable worth and the statement does talk of a real sociological phenomenon.
I think it is entirely possible to write about this phenomenon without having to stretch the truth.
EDIT: I just realized that the article doesn't really say anything about Aussies.
So it doesn't really say anything for certain. It does bring up the common stereotypes of traditional Indian women being forced to stay home, and India's economy being two speeds - the wealthy Fabian socialist government, and poor labor-intensive private sector.
BPO does add to the private sector, and bring in some easy money (as long as India stays poor). There are other elements of the private sector, such as software engineering companies, automobile manufacturing (Tato), and so on; and India's domestic demand (which is partly fueled by BPO) drives these.
I doubt BPO can really poison India's economy, the way tourist dollars can deskill some places. BPO is too small, and India's too big.
I don't quite understand this concern. Do people worry any other paid actor is at risk of forgetting who he is?
http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4778488_movie-star-spend-workda...
This concern over the call center workers' lost identity seems silly to me.
"Just stating facts, guys," Lekha began, as we scribbled notes, "Australia is known as the dumbest continent. Literally, college was unknown there until recently. So speak slowly." Next to me, a young man in a turban wrote No college in his notebook.
I can't comment on the dumbest continent thing, but it is true that the Indian accent often sounds very fast to Australians.
"Australians drink constantly," Lekha continued. "If you call on a Friday night, they'll be smashed—every time."
lol.
"Oh, and don't attempt to make small talk with them about their pets, okay? They can be quite touchy about animals."
WTF?? Where did they get this from? Can anyone explain the source for this?
Regarding slow talkers, it depends on where you come from in Aus (stereotypically rural and/or Queenslander). I travelled across the US and when I approached NYC I was eager to hear people speaking at a 'normal' rate, as I was a bit fatigued from having to slow down my rate of speech (I'm also known as 'the quiet one' among by friends). And when I got to NYC... New Yorkers still didn't speak fast enough for me. I didn't have to slow down, but it was still noticeably slower than what I was used to.
As for college being unknown here until recently, maybe they mean recently compared to India? 150 years is a drop in the bucket to several thousand...
On US accents - have you seen the US Accent Test[1]? taking it as a foreigner is pretty interesting. Apparently I have a Northeastern accent (I'm from Adelaide).
[1] http://www.youthink.com/quiz.cfm?action=go_detail&sub_ac...
My observation as well :-)
My personal experience in the US is that the people are very welcoming and friendly, which leads me to think that Americans are bighearted to people they personally know, but not so much to strangers - eg witness the powerful currents of public opinion against welfare or universal healthcare that don't really exist in contemporary countries.
May be there are some advantages to a 2 party system but it left the whole country divided and there seems to be no middle ground anywhere in sight.
Two, economies go through development cycles. They start out in the low-skill jobs and then move on. For example look at the shipbuilding industry. Moved from the west to Japan in the 60's, who then used it to move to other heavy industries. After Japan had grown skills and incomes increased the industry moved to Korea. The same cycle is in process right now, with the industry now moving to China. Don't hate outsourcing, but use it to build a better future.