Artwork by Harvey Chan for
FPOne Night @ the Call Center
By Chetan Bhagat
291 pages, New Delhi:
Rupa & Co., 2005 (in English)
If you’re an American living in New York and your computer crashes, your dishwasher malfunctions, or you’re overdue on your credit card payments, chances are good that your call for help will be answered by a bright, young twentysomething Indian graduate in New Delhi with a headset, a flickering monitor, and a fake American accent.
To many, the call center has become the symbol of India’s rapidly globalizing economy. While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic population of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases. They feign familiarity with a culture and climate they’ve never experienced, earn salaries that their elders couldn’t have imagined (but still a fraction of what an American would make), and enjoy a lifestyle that’s a cocktail of premature affluence and ersatz Westernization. It’s a subculture that merits closer examination, and in Chetan Bhagat’s One Night @ the Call Center, a breezy bestseller that has taken middle-class India by storm, the Samuel Johnsons of this brave new world have found their Boswell.
For all its billion-strong population, only 61 percent of whom can officially read, India is hardly commercially viable territory for the workaday novelist. The typical Indian “bestseller” sells between 3,000...
