Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“The first night, I arrived and they asked me to put on this uniform. So I put it on but I felt very awkward. And after three or four hours of that job I thought, ‘This isn’t me.’ I hung up the uniform and left the hotel at three in the morning. I walked all the way home. Fifteen kilometres. And the whole way I was wondering what I would do. How was I going to survive if my ego was so important?”

At this point of desperation, Siddhartha had a chance meeting with a family acquaintance who gave him a job in his decorating firm. The work involved going from site to site checking on the progress of painters and carpenters, and the salary was Rs 2,500 [$52] per month.

Siddhartha hated this job. But it bought him time. Time enough for him to hear a phrase he had never heard before: ‘business process outsourcing’.

“By the term ‘BPO’ I understood ‘call centre’ — I didn’t know that companies outsourced many functions other than customer service. So I wanted to work in a call centre. I spoke English fluently, but when I interviewed with the international call centres they said, ‘Your accent is too strong.’ So then I looked for Indian call centres and I got a job with Tata Indicom. The shift lasted from eleven at night to eight in the morning. They would pick us up in a bus and take us to the call centre. Customers would call with problems — their text messages weren’t working, their calls were cutting out — and we would solve them. I volunteered for the night shift because the volume of calls during the day was almost impossible, and also, if I worked at night, I would have the whole day to look for other jobs. For months I hardly saw my brother because I got home when he was leaving for work and he got home just as I left.

“Working at night was interesting. We were all men on the night shift and half the callers were women who wanted to chat. Relationships would form: we started to recognise callers and to put their calls through to the person they wanted to speak to. You would hear people shouting across the room like this: ‘Hey Karthik, Mrs Santoshi wants you to call her back.’ ‘Oh yes. It’s her birthday today: I promised to call her.’ These calls couldn’t last long because everything was monitored. But some of these flirtations led to real relationships.

“There are disadvantages to working at night. The main one is that the manager never sees you. You are just head count. Just a number. All the people who worked in the day were being promoted and I decided I had to go and see the manager face to face. In corporations, unless you ask for things, you don’t get them.

“First they told me to come back after a few days. So I did. Then they said ‘We’re not offering you a promotion’. I said, ‘Why not? Here are the requirements you set for me and I have met them all.’ I don’t know what got in to me that day but I was very insistent. So he said ‘Either you work or you leave, but there will be no promotion.’ So I said, ‘I’ll leave then’. And I walked out.”

We are sitting in Siddhartha’s apartment. He lives in one of the housing complexes dubbed ‘DDA flats’ after the Delhi Development Authority which built them. Conceived in the 1950s, and modelled on apartment complexes in the Soviet Bloc, new clusters of DDA flats were built all over Delhi until the 1980s without significant change to their design. The quality, however, dropped off greatly in the latter years, as the DDA’s idealism evaporated: the early developments, such as the one we are in, still strike one as tranquil and well-made, while the ones built later are falling down.

For those middle-class families who migrated to the capital between the 1960s and 1980s — the teachers, academics and doctors, for instance, who staffed the capital’s great new institutions — DDA flats provided the quintessential domestic landscape. Their acres of yellow stippled walls, their banks of mailboxes, their grassy courtyards with flowers and children’s swings, their maze of staircases always labelled with the same mass-produced digits — many of them half painted over, now — are the backdrop to so many Delhi childhoods.

It is a weekend afternoon, and we are sitting in front of the living room window which overlooks the garden where a gardener is watering rows of potted plants. Siddhartha’s mother is preparing lunch in the kitchen. His brother is watching cricket.

“Afterwards I realised what a huge blunder I’d made. I was right back where I’d started. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go back to them and say, ‘Sorry I didn’t mean it.’ So I started trying to get another job. It was really difficult. I was sitting at home all day and pretending to my mother in Kolkata that I was going to work, since I hadn’t told her what had happened.”

Finally, Siddhartha saw an ad in the paper for a job fair. He went along and was invited to Gurgaon for an interview with GECIS.

“I had no idea how to go to Gurgaon back then. I left at six in the morning to make sure I got there by nine. And I got the job. My shift coincided with the US day which meant I worked from eight in the evening to four in the morning, processing all the insurance claims.

“I was very happy. I mean, we were all very elated. I was getting a monthly salary from a foreign corporation. Before that I was outsourced — I was not on the payrolls of Tata Indicom but of the call centre which serviced them. So one of the questions I asked in my interview with GE was whether I would be on the company’s payroll. And that was the start of everything.

“Soon after I started working with GECIS, GE sold its stake in the company and it was renamed Genpact. It was no longer part of GE and it could provide services to other companies as well. I began working on the business development team and we reached out to companies like Pfizer, Wachovia and Cadbury. Because we had been working for GE for so many years, it was easy to convince other global companies to send their back-end processes to Gurgaon.”

Siddhartha had his break. He was managing Genpact’s work for Pfizer, and he had a respectable income. His brother was also working for a call centre by now — and between them they were earning about $1,500 a month, of which they saved a half.

“My mother quit her job in Kolkata and came to stay with us. Before that, as two bachelors, we were compromising on a lot of things but when a female member of the family is around, you can’t do that. We moved into a better apartment. I went on business trips to Europe and America. The following year, I got a job with Barclays Bank. We bought a plot of land in Kolkata to build a house on. We moved into this place.”

Siddhartha is not without a sense of good fortune.

“Since globalisation, everything has changed for the middle classes. I saw the earlier generation in Kolkata — people who were in their thirties when I was a teenager — and they never used to get a job. They would graduate from college and then they all became private tutors. That was the only work they could get. Once in a while, someone used to get a corporate job and move away from Kolkata, and everyone used to talk about those people. They were the exceptions. But now, because of the BPO world, people get a job very easily. In that sense, young people’s lives have become very good.”

Siddhartha’s mother summons us to lunch. We go through to the dining room, where three places are laid out for the men. Siddhartha’s mother will serve us and eat later. We sit down in front of pots of steaming rice, chicken and daal.

“I tell him,” his mother says as she serves mountains of rice onto each plate, “that it’s time to get married. Now we are comfortable, it’s time to think about finding a wife! For ten years neither of them has done anything except work. They haven’t enjoyed themselves at all.”