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FOR all our billion-strong population, 620 million 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 successive reprints of 2000 copies or so every nine or twelve months. In this modest market, One Night @ the Call Center has reportedly sold over 1,00,000 copies in the two months since its publication, and the demand shows no sign of letting up. Its author, Chetan Bhagat, a 31-year-old whizkid with degrees from two of our country's most prestigious educational institutions — a bachelor's in engineering from IIT and a MBA from IIM — works for Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong and dabbles in didactic fiction in his spare time. The success of his previous novel, Five Point Someone, a tale of three college friends, shows he 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.A different world
So what is the world he's portraying? The call centre has become the symbol of India's newly globalised economy. While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young cohort of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they've never actually experienced, earning salaries that were undreamt of by their elders (but a fraction of what an American would make) and enjoying a lifestyle that's a cocktail of premature affluence and ersatz Westernisation transplanted to an Indian setting.
A compulsive read
The novel is a compulsively quick read. Written in a simple, unpretentious (and unadorned) style, One Night @ the Call Center tells the story of six colleagues at a New Delhi call centre on one dramatic night when their lives all but fall apart and their existential crises are resolved literally through divine intervention (a phone call from God). It isn't great literature: serious critics will no doubt cavil at the two-dimensional characterisation, the pedestrian prose, the plot's contrived deus ex machina, 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 centre workers think, talk, eat, drink, date, dress and behave. "My English is not that great," says the narrator, Shyam Mehra ("Sam Marcy" at the call centre). "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."
Chetan Bhagat may not use many big words, but he does have a big idea. The interactions amongst his six protagonists make for pleasureable, highly entertaining reading — until the novel turns into a screed against their profession. For, Bhagat, it turns out, doesn't like call centres. 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 centre 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," Bhagat declaims in Vroom's voice, "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... while bad bosses and stupid Americans suck the lifeblood out of our country's most productive generation."
Strong stuff, especially coming from an expatriate 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 7,00,000 Indians, many like Bhagat's characters, work in the "business process outsourcing" industry, which contributes an estimated $17 billion to the burgeoning Indian economy. "They toss their loose change at us," says Bhagat/Vroom of the American companies. Yet call centres are multiplying, and the demand for skilled "agents" has driven salaries up to ever more attractive levels.
Passport to a better life
While many may suffer the angst this novel so effectively depicts, most see a job in a call centre as a passport to a better life, one offering more possibilities and choices than were available to the previous generation. These young Indians may keep unsocial hours, neglect their family obligations, drink excessive cocktails with names like "Long Island Ice 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. Buy One Night @ the Call Center Book Online in India at Lowest Price with Free Shipping Across the India By Infibeam.com
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