Anuvab Pal’s latest work of fiction- 1888 Dial India is a satirical take on some very topical issues, in characteristic flair which will have you rolling with laughter. Here is something about the book: 2009—year of the slump. America is in the grip of severe economic hardship and unemployment. The only numbers that are on the rise is the suicide rate. Arun Gupta, entrepreneur, lothario, Aramis cologne user, evangelist of new India’s new dreams, sees a glimmer of a business plan form out of the American crisis. He wants to save lives. And he wants to do it sitting in his baroque Navi Mumbai office. His idea is simple. If everything can be outsourced to India, why not the saving of American lives? Part rant, part satire, 1888 Dial India documents, through the politically incorrect words of its antihero, the dreams of corporate India.
And here is what Anuvab has to say about writing this book…
There seems to be a lot written about outsourcing. Which is good. We are apparently leading the world in repairing things, giving driving directions, solving credit card logistics, even helping the West with personalized butler services (the English tradition has to continue somehow). Some people say this is not very good for new India’s service classes. That it creates essentially the telecom equivalent of the assembly line worker and leaves them disoriented, without skills, staring out at 3 am into a flood of Gurgaon neon. People criticizing a very public economic phenomenon are also good. That’s two good things.
The entrepreneurs who’ve built these companies, and now regular ambassadors of new India’s rise at various “Ideas conferences” on CNBC, defend by saying, we wouldn’t be growing at 8% if it weren’t for the west’s housekeeping work. That without their companies it would be the 1980’s all over again which sort of looked like this; Millions of college graduates lining up for a few thousand government jobs, fleeing to any American university, cast politics, or political manoeuvres generally for all jobs, the far more difficult meritocratic goal of being IIT or IIM graduates which would lead to a marketing manager’s job in a multinational consumer durables company like Hindustan Lever (the ultimate) which in practicality translated to living in villages without electricity studying the soap buying habits of drunk farmers. And occasionally, accidentally, stopping inter-cast gang warfare. It’s easy to see thus why these entrepreneurs are also good.
This is, however, not an essay on new Indian entrepreneurism. Pick up any business magazine, they write it much better and put photographs of people standing in front of whatever they are entrepreneurs of, smiling.
When I got out of reasonably middle-of-the-road college in the US in the late 90’s, I got a job on Wall Street researching companies and filling out excel spreadsheets with financial data on that company. I couldn’t get that job today. As in, not because I am not smart enough (I wasn’t back then either) but because that job doesn’t exist in New York anymore. It exists in Bangalore, Gurgaon, Vashi, Powai, Salt Lake or any other satellite Indian town with glass and steel buildings, built on the outsourcing business, essentially functioning as a Wall Street back office. If the Occupy Wall Street Movement is to have any impact, they should begin where Wall Street’s numbers live now, which is Sector 5, Haryana for example. The only irony here is that everyone I worked with in New York seemed to be Indians and everyone that the outsourced jobs have gone to, are also Indians. So for all the talk of American job losses, what I could see, in my limited financial outsourcing space, were job losses for us then back to us. Some of my US colleagues are doing the same job today in Powai and Gurgaon and Bangalore etc., phrases like “let’s cross the t’s and dot the i’s” being their only differentiator from the locally educated.
Most Americans I graduated with wanted to travel the world, smoke marijuana, listen to Dave Mathews, write a screenplay, then think about life. In hindsight, a far better career plan than joining an Investment bank three days after graduation or saying things like “I would like to be an investment banker” when no one had any idea what that meant. Except moving to New York City (ergo, nightlife, girls and such) which everyone wanted to do. Today, thanks to outsourcing, even that’s gone. I don’t see too many people saying “I want to be an investment banker and I am really looking forward to my new cubicle on Hosur Road”.
Being a kind of job nobody likes to do but it pays brilliantly, its perhaps no surprise that the essential core of the subprime mortgage crisis were bankers not studying the loans they were packaging. It’s not their fault. They were far too busy planning the Christmas India holiday, hoping to get laid at a wedding, and already thinking of ways to extend the vacation by killing off a relative (grandfather was always a favourite). I tried that once (my real grandfather had passed away when my father was three), the clever British man I worked for turned around and said, “You’re not the first Indian whose worked for me you know”. I have no idea why I wrote this paragraph or what it has to do with my new book.
Oh yes, outsourcing. Financial outsourcing. Again, just like credit cards, driving directions, switching phone companies, package holidays, same sort of thing, only not bothering British/American people on the phone, but doing complex Microsoft excel mathematics for Investment Banks. At half the cost. The essential idea being the same- cheaper labour. This correlates to the essential worry of outsourcing entrepreneurs in an increasingly expensive India, of cheaper labour in other countries. It takes days for a Gurgaon or Bangalore to disappear if Manila or Dhaka offers cheaper labour and polite English and excel stars. All we’re left with are ghosts of DLF buildings, internet cables and unlit Erikson signs.
Right, but that’s not my point either. My point is all this has been said by everybody else. And better. Someone said the world is flat which basically is another way of saying what I’ve said above but far more brilliantly. We knew it because it was happening here. We noticed. Certainly the guys that became billionaires noticed. I guess a book had to be written to tell Americans to notice and realize, “Ah, that’s whose been calling me”. Films were made about outsourcing (cross cultural phone love being a natural plot); disillusionment of language, accents, identity got explored by all sorts of academics and documentary film makers. I watched John and Jane, a brilliant film on the subject by Asim Ahluwalia, and two of his characters stayed with me. One that came home after a night of working at the call centre and danced, alone. And the other, a Punjabi woman who got blonde hair and started imagining she was American, from Miami, and only wanted to marry another blonde American person.
Ok I need to shut up and tell you why I wrote a little paperback novel on outsourcing.
Which I’ll do in the next part of this blog.
Anuvab Pal is an acclaimed playwright and screenplay writer. His screenplays include the awardwinning The Loins of Punjab and The President is Coming. His plays, which have been performed at numerous festivals, include Chaos Theory, Fatwa, Paris and Life, Love, and ETIBDA. Anuvab has also written for the acclaimed sitcoms Frasier and Law and Order. He currently lives and works in Mumbai. 1888 Dial India is his novel published by Random House India in October 2011 and is available in stores for Rs 150. Find out more from the Random House India website.
