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Six friends are selling home appliances to the US from a call centre in India.
Each has an issue with LOVE!
Written by Chetan Bhagat
FRAME STORY
A girl offers to tell the author a story on the condition that he has to make it his second book.
Curious...
He hesitates...but...finally agrees!
Works beside the girl who's just dumped him.
He's dating someone he can't stand, just to get over her.
She cannot make up her mind between what she wants and pleasing her mother.
She is about to marry a rich NRI when she finds out some uncomfortable truths about her future husband.
Portrayed as a confused but
patriotic person,
who is dissatisfied with himself.
Radhika lives with her in-laws and her absent husband.She is angry with the world and controls her feelings with anti depressants.
She's just short of becoming a model.
Two inches short to be precise
Wants to reconcile with his estranged son though he realizes he will need to swallow his ego in the process.
But they all have one thing in common
A cruel BOSS!
And one day, while facing a life and death issue...they get a call
From GOD
they get motivated by their conversation with God...enventually solve all their problems
Globalization
It refers to the increasing integration of economies around the world, particularly through the movement of goods, services, and capital across borders.
Call Centres
Outsourcing
(BPO)
Companies
+ Cheap labour
Employees
+ Money
- Biological Clock - lack of sleep
- Alienation from family
- Physical and Mental Strain
Dislocated in time:employees work through the night when business hours are active in the day time in the US
Meghna, who works during the midnight shift takes a call from Philadephia. Her computer screen flashes the weather conditions in Philadelphia and she is able to chat with the caller about the perfect day in Philly. She then hangs up saying `have a good day'. But as she looks outside her glass building in her office, it is pitch dark and she is reminded of where she is.
When family members prepare to go to work in the morning, agents return home to get sleep for the rest of the day. And when family returns home in the early evening, employees get ready to go to work.
"I had lost touch with my relatives. I used to get home at 4 in the morning and when I woke up, my family was our at work and it was just TV or computer games for me."
Accent-neutralization
Safe International Accents
De-Indianization
Call centre agents have to go through a rigorous training in American culture, especially 'accent training'.
Call agents are required to take on an American linguistic identity.
Includes a name change: Suman-Susan, Amit-Alex
Accents have to be regulated so that the customer calling from the West has no way of recognizing that the voice on the other end is not American.
Selection criteria of candidates: How thick is his/her regional accent?
Can it be modified and trained into American-ness?
Candidates who successfulLy pass such training are called CONVERTED AMERICANS
E.g.: US customers of Dell had been complaining about 'accent interference' and agents' inability to engage in efficient American-style conversational English. This finally caused Dell to move much of its customer inquiry services back to Texas from Bangalore, India.
Balasubramanyam, which is a typical South Indian name, becomes Betty Coulter, who creates the identity of a typical 21-year-old college graduate, with a management degree, from Illinois. Betty Coulter likes wearing bell-bottom jeans and is an avid fan of Friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her family comprises her parents, Robert and Della Grace, Irish immigrants who reside in Illinois. Her brother is James, a 15-year-old.
There is a tremendous pressure to come across as an `authentic' American, since call centres run the risk of losing the franchise with the parent company if the agent does not convincingly come across as an American.
Described as Colonial Mimicry by Homi Bhabha (Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University)
Third world worker's body is colonized through the colonization of the body's clock and its biological functioning.
Body's biological functioning is invaded because the real price paid by the call centre workers:
Fatigue, exhaust, stress, sleep deprivation, heart diseases, mental health problems.
During colonialism, colonizer and the colonized inhabited the same physical time.
In this case, however, the reversal of day and night results in violence towards the health of the third world body.
Who asks them to listen to their own calling
Navneet & Aanchal
Delhi
Kanpur
Company takes a part of its business and gives it to another company
India - most preferred destination for outsourcing
E.g. Dell, Citibank,AT&T, AOL...
What is outsourcing?
India Today:the electronic housekeeper to the world, taking care of a host of routine activities for multinational giants such as credit card inquiries, invoices, billings etc.
The Faces Of Globalization: A Dilemma For India
illustration only
by Indrajit Basu
Calcutta (UPI) Mar 12, 2004
It's good for the economy; it creates employment, lots of it, and working nights at India's back offices is pleasing and financially rewarding for a huge number of young Indians.
However, while India's money-spinning industry of taking service jobs from overseas is turning out to be a source of discomfort for U.S. and European politicians, the subcontinent is fast realizing that its now-famed success in so-called Business Process Outsourcing may have come at the cost of a generation's mental well-being.
Owing to the 10 1/2 hour time difference between the Western Hemisphere, particularly the United States, which sends more service jobs abroad than anyone else, almost all Indian back office operations have to work at shifts typically running from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. local time to coincide with the daytime office hours in the United States.
And it's this working at nights that requires adjusting the biological clock and social practices to a different time, which is turning out to be a major cause for health-related and social problems.
Take the instance of Delhi-based college dropout Sandeep Jain, who was ecstatic when he received a job offer for $150 a month two years ago from a leading Delhi-based call center. This was the chance the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pink Floyd fan was waiting for.
"For the first time, I was made to feel that I was useful and that somebody appreciated my knowledge of English movies and my passion for Western music," he said.
A year later, Sandy, as he called himself for his overseas clients, switched to another call center, which offered him double the money and a training trip to the United States. The training trip was really the carrot for Sandy who had by then begun to tire of the tedium of a help desk job.
But the trip was significant since he could now finally prove to his conservative mother that he too was off to the United States like his "cousins in software."
But unlike his cousins in software, he soon begun to exhibit behavioral and physiological changes. He had lost 12 pounds in seven months, was smoking over 10 cigarettes a day and drank till he passed out every Friday.
"I am done with it (the back-office job)," he said before giving up his call-center job last December and joining a night college.
"I had lost touch with my relatives. I used to get home at four in the morning and when I woke up, my family was out at work and it was just TV or computer games for me."
"It was also the monotony of work and boredom that sometimes made me feel suicidal," Sandy said.
Sandeep is just one of many in the country's 500,000-strong young work force in India's back-office sectors who are facing such stress.
"The job is so false," griped another disgruntled 23-year-old back office worker who eventually also quit his job in a Mumbai call center to pursue higher studies. "You talk like an American, behave like one, but you are not one. It's almost like a trap."
"I have had more than a 100 cases of call center employees turning up with a series of complaints," says Sanjay Chugh, a Delhi-based psychiatrist. "The typical problems tend to be depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and relationship-related problems."
Indeed, the high degree of dissatisfaction that is fast dawning on Indian back office employees is getting to be a major cause for worry in India's back office sector, which is billed as one of the country's most important sectors for economic growth.
In a recent survey of employee satisfaction in what the industry calls Business Process Outsourcing, a staggering 35 percent of respondents said they are likely to leave because they cannot handle the schedule.
The survey also showed something else: Money remains the biggest reason why most people join call centers.
Forty-five percent of all respondents across the industry said they joined up for the money, with another 42 percent adding that they would most likely leave for better opportunities, i.e. read money, elsewhere.
And 27 percent said they would leave either because of work stress or the sheer physical strain that was too much to handle.
Even work related ailments are reality. Sleeping disorders, digestive system disorders and eyesight problems are prevalent.
Rattled by this sudden high level of dissatisfaction and employee dropouts, the country's back office sector has started to put stress-busters in place and ramp up morale.
Most employers have started holding routine parties on campus and social bonding events within the team to drive away part of the monotony and convey that "the company cares."
Nishi Roy, a human resource officer, said, "They have started doing everything they can to make a call center a fun place to work in, from hosting parties, contests to taking employees to offsite picnics."
"The atmosphere is very much like a college. Even our breaks are like those between periods," says Anurag a 21-year-old just out of college and just two-months into a call center job.
Still, even as the money and the act of donning an American life-style through their working hours continues to be the initial draw for many youngsters in the country's numerous back offices and call centers, a worry that is looming large is: Would the high social and health costs that the country is paying for raking in billions of dollars, spoil India's back office party sooner rather than later?
The Faces of Globalization -- The above piece by UPI Calcutta correspondent Indrajit Basu kicks off a half-year series by United Press International which will focus each week on the human face of globalization in locales ranging from India, China, South America, Europe and the Middle East to the heartland of the United States. The series will focus on a wide range of social and economic issues facing those whose jobs have been affected for good or ill by the worldwide investment, trade and technological interconnections that have come to be known as globalization.
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