The call center phenomenon

In Anish Trivedi's book call me Dan, the protagonist Gautam or Dan, finds himself as the objectu00a0 of paternal scornu00a0- for working in a call center. When are you going to get a proper job? His father sometimes secretly envious of the money his son is making asks him. Yet, before Gautam or his 'Amreecan' avatar Dan was born, Chetan Bhagat had already proved that call centers had become the new aspiration avenue for a section of youth which was not going to apologise for not graduating or opting for the big bucks over conventional jobs.


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Chetan Bhagat's One Night @ the Call Center puts its finger on the pulse of a generation whose world comprised overpriced coffees, Facebook friends and on-the-go music, food and at times, even sex. His book pushed all the right buttons, the writing taking the reader from call center to home to relationships all a rollicking roller coaster ride of one night. It is Bhagat's characters though who lured contemporary readers.

Young, urbane, angst-ridden, walking a tightrope between love, family and work they could have been you. And they most probably were. The call center where the drama was played out became the motif for a robust Indian economy and a stage where characters found their world turned upside down in one implausible, though compelling night.u00a0u00a0u00a0

Q: Can you explain the dark undertones a bit more?
A: Yes, if you scrape beneath the surface, the whole call centre phenomenon has some dark shades to it. However, ON@TCC is pure entertainment. The dark messages come every now and then, but mostly readers should get ready for a fun night.

Q: Is it only for call center people?
A: No, not at all. Just as my last book, the story is universal. Just as in the movie Titanic, you didn't have to have travelled on a ship to enjoy the story; same goes for ON@TCC. The call centre is just an interesting setting.

Q: What was the biggest challenge?
A: There were three main challenges. One, I have not really worked in a call center. However, many call center people helped me tremendously in my research.

The second challenge was to set the story in one night. How can you have a novel set over an 11-hour period? However, once done it becomes a key highlight of the story.

The final challenge was that there are three female characters this time (compared to one for my other book Five Point Someone). Understanding one woman is hard enough, so you can imagine what happened to me when I tried to understand three at a time.

Maybe, Bhagat understood the call center phenomenon just as well as Thomas Freidman, writer, The World Is Flat did, but expressed it in his own prose. Friedman who explained call centers and outsourcing in his book The World is Flat, came to Bangalore, India, to make a documentary film about the outsourcing of American call center jobs there.

Friedman was a speaker at a Carnegie Council talk in 2006 and this is what he said about India and call centers:
"Last year, in January, we were thinking about what to do for our next documentary. At that time, the issue of the world's perception of America was really high in everyone's agenda. I had this idea:

Why don't we go to call centers around the world, and interview young people who spend their days imitating Americans on what they thought of America. I thought it would make a very interesting kind of double perspective.

I thought,u00a0 "Why don't we just go to Bangalore, the outsourcing capital of India, the Silicon Valley of India, and let's just do a documentary called The Other Side of Outsourcing. Let's look at this outsourcing issue just from the Indian perspective and see what it really looks like from the ground up."