Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"We have to sign up two hundred and twenty-five American contractors a month for this company," Hardeep said. "They have to be involved in plumbing, electrical, building, and so forth. It's almost impossible to find them in some states. New York is tough. Arizona is better. California is hard."

"How does she know who to call?"

"We purchase telephone numbers."

These were the leads—I thought of them as the Glengarry leads, and I imagined this room of callers fitting neatly into the plot of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross,

the definitive drama on cold-calling and rejection. The workers in Bangalore were not vying for bonuses or a set of steak knives, but every time one of them snagged a contractor, he or she got a gold star on the leader board.

"David Lewis" (Nitish Chandra) said, "I make about one hundred and thirty calls a day. It's really hard. Every twenty calls we get to speak to a contractor. Out of, say, six interested, we sign up one."

"Hello, this is Tina," said Aisha, in an accent that was nicely nasal, and after a brief exchange, "Can I leave my number?"

She dictated a number that was in the 212 area code—New York City—and when the person phoned back, from somewhere in the USA, the call would be routed to Bangalore.

As I was writing this down, someone called out, "Chris just got another star on the board!"

"Chris Carter," who was Subramaniam to his parents and friends, had been working in the call center for over a year and had a pleasant and persuasive manner. He also had mastered a forced but fairly convincing American accent—all of them had been drilled intensively.

"Do you say route or rowt?" I asked. "Roof or ruff?"

Rowt and ruff, they said. And in-surance. And ree

-peat. And minny for many, peenless for painless. All the pronunciations that I found annoying.

"This is Sean Harris," Ramesh was saying, tapping his pencil on a scribble pad. "We require a contractor in the Santa Rosa area. We have minny jobs. May I kindly speak to the manager?"

This would go on until two or three in the morning, the whole room cold-calling California, doing the impossible, looking for willing plumbers. There were a hundred callers in this room, a thousand employed by this firm, ten thousand callers in Bangalore—a figure that was expected to triple in the next few years.

It was difficult for me to get accurate salary figures from any of the managers—every one shrank at my question; it was a sensitive issue. Twenty-five hundred dollars a year was the lowest amount I heard for a newcomer; some earned $4,000. Someone at the top of the pay scale could expect to earn $30,000 or $40,000, which was a very high salary in India, and few achieved it. Most stayed at the bottom, averaging about $50 a week, but because of the stressful nature of the job, and the unsocial hours, there was a high dropout rate. Some techies and software support men I met at the company gym said they earned $6,000 or $7,000 a year, and some software designers earned $10,000—more than enough to tempt them to stay, but a pittance to the American client. There was never a shortage of applicants: Hardeep said he was besieged by new graduates looking for work. Again I recognized the paradox, that India's poor were its wealth.

Since the time of the East India Company, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labor had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labor was the basis of the British Raj, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, whether it was growing cotton for the textile mills, or jute for rope, or tea to satisfy the imperial thirst, or (as in the 1850s) Indian opium for the purpose of weakening China, turning it into a nation of addicts, and enriching the British. Indians were still being exploited, but grunt labor and muscle power had ceased to be of much use; the workers now were intelligent, educated, mostly young, a whole workforce of cultivated coolies.

One of the older municipal buildings in Bangalore was Mayo Hall. A two-story ecclesiastical-looking structure built at the end of the nineteenth century, it was dedicated to the memory of India's fourth British viceroy, Lord Mayo. Lord Mayo's pomposities led him to make a ceremonial visit to a penal colony in the Andaman Islands, some distance from India's eastern coast, and there he met his end, a crazed convict knifing him to death. This same Lord Mayo once said, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race."

In my succeeding days in Bangalore, I met some of the dropouts. Vidiadhar and Vincent had managed one of the earliest call centers, processing mortgages for an Australian company, providing tech support, and selling software.

"It was fun for a while, but the hours were awful," Vidiadhar said.

"The big problem was the perverts," Vincent said. "Aussies! They'd hear a woman's voice on the line and say, 'Go out with me on a date and I'll buy everything you're selling.'"

"Some would say, 'What are you wearing?'"