Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Through soundproof windows, I could see the cubicles—sixty or eighty to a room—where Indian employees wearing headphones were speaking to American callers who had problems with their products. A large banner at the front of one room read, What can I do to resolve your issue today?

These were voice-based technical supporters, whose accents and manner needed to be reassuring.

Just rotate the prahduct until the bahdum is verdigal, and look for the ten-digit serial number. It should start with B. B for Bahb.

In other departments, accents were less important. One room was staffed entirely by medical technicians and doctors, fielding medical questions from a Danish HMO. They were speaking to Danes in Esbjerg and Aalborg and Copenhagen, brainstorming problems pertaining to diabetes.

Another zone at TCS was devoted to number crunching: several thousand cubicles of clerks at computers helping to redeem frequent-flier miles, or deal with pricing, or explain other ticket matters for international airlines.

"You see this man," Mr. Randeria said. "He is speaking to a ticket agent in—it could be New York, it could be Dallas—who has a problem with a ticket."

The employees in this room didn't need American accents or names; they were providing backup, emergency service, and tech support. The room was a racket of undifferentiated voices, like a cage of macaws.

"Airlines are some of our best customers. For them to get the maximum benefit from a flight, they need advice on space control and yield management."

From ticketing to pricing to seating logistics (which is what I took "space control" to mean), all this was managed by these techies in Vikhroli, who worked every day and every night of the year.

"It's stressful work," Mr. Randeria said. Because of that, TCS provided a gym, a cafeteria, and a resident doctor. And all employees commuted to work by the company shuttle service, which stopped at various hubs in the city.

"Suppose there's a power cut?" I asked. Such things were common, and barely concealed under the euphemisms "brownout," "rolling blackout," or "load shedding." "What happens then?"

"Last July we had power cuts. Ninety-three centimeters of rain in sixteen hours." That was more than three feet of rain in a little more than half a day! But Mr. Randeria was smiling. "We had two hundred percent redundancy backup. I'll show you."

He took me to a towering building at the rear of the complex. "This is the UPS—uninterrupted power supply. But we also have additional backup generators. In India these are essential."

"This seems a success story," I said.

"If IT and BPO hadn't happened, India would be twenty years behind. Look at China. China is already the leader in hardware and is attempting to be the leader in software. But we have the advantage of language."

"Can China learn English fast enough to be competitive with India?"

"Time will tell," he said. "We put a big emphasis on training."

It was obvious that such an enterprise succeeded because there was a large workforce of intelligent, polite English-speakers with a good education and a need for money; people who could not leave India; who, at an earlier time—as when I was here last—would have sought jobs as schoolteachers, civil servants, accountants, pen pushers, and paper chewers; who filled the traditional Indian occupations for the educated, as pundits and bunniahs and box wallahs.

This was the cleanest and most orderly building I had so far seen in India, and even as I was leaving I was asking Mr. Randeria questions about training and expansion and salaries.

"Mr. Paul," he said gently, "what you should do is see our operation in Bangalore. Just Bangalore itself—you will be awestruck."

NIGHT TRAIN TO BANGALORE

THE UDYAN EXPRESS

EARLY MORNING MUMBAI was sunlit and damp and somewhat slimy from a night of condensation on the old dark paving stones, a city of empty streets, before workers and traffic hit town and the sun was at its worst. But now, at six or so, as I was hurrying to Victoria Station, the slime helped me remember the city I had seen long ago, a city of squatters and sweepers and rickshaws, with a ripe and reeking smell—of money and death.

Victoria had a new name. The grandiose, cathedral-like building (more "disappointed Gothic"), commemorating the queen's 1887 jubilee and one of the grandest railway stations in the world, was now called Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminus, after the wily warrior king of the Marathas, who unified Maharashtra and battled the Mughals in the seventeenth century.