The space of Call Centres: JOHN AND JANE: TOLL FREE

The movie was about how call centers (and the new IT service economy), the new boom of our Indian economy, claiming to provide new job opportunities to us; are becoming agents of a cultural brainwashing. To be efficient in these jobs and serve the customer better requires you to relate to their space, their malls, products, their systems. In the process of establishing this relationship there is a constant comparison, abundance v/s less, variety, choice, brands, better. (They play on our psyche as consumers to sell the product or provide service more efficiently.)

So I finally caught the movie John and Jane at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), a part of the HBO series for introducing New film/ New directors.

The audience: I went there expecting it to be like our Film festivals, a mixture of film enthusiasts like me, the cool critics in their kurtas and pajamas, young aspiring film makers and hoards of the directors friends. Well I was surprised (or should I have been?) 98% of the audience was white. Only 2% were Indians. I was excited when Ashim was introduced. He is from Mumbai. I felt a surge of pride as if I already knew him.

The movie started with shots of Times Square, as if shot from a car, the surreal, undying spirit of Times Square. It then moved into the house of a middle class Christian house in Mumbai, Glen and his mother. She had this irritating throaty accent, whenever she called out to her son “Glaain”(which I liked!).

I liked Glen; he was full of “fuck” all the time and in constant dissatisfaction with his call centre job. Ashim caught it in parts, the dissatisfaction of the youth that is restless, impatient and unable to adjust to the new kind of “customer service” job which does not fit into our imagination of a livelihood. We imagine ourselves to be doctors, engineers, of creating rather than serving. (Is it a middle class aspiration?)

With the call center boom being a relatively new phenomenon, starting only in about 2001, he captured to a certain extent the transition they are creating in our notions of self, work, social life and interaction. Glen’s dissatisfaction with the job because he does not get or Indian holidays but American holidays. It was not only a sense of betraying his country and accepting the loyalty of another I felt but also of getting cut off from his friends and social group or that he does not care who the anonymous customer at the other end of the line is and why he has to be subservient to him. His mother tells him matter of factly, that these are the demands of the job and he has to accept it. (Behind me, two white American women went tsk tsk... look what America is doing to this country. I was getting quite pissed with them)

The movie transitioned to other employees who liked the job and eventually to Shanti? who became the job herself. She transformed herself into a blonde, bleached her hair, her eyelashes and spoke with an American accent. She believed she was American. It was scary.

There was constant feeling of impending danger in the movie, an ominous sound playing in the background. I could not help but question the content. Like one of the audience later pointed that he had eliminated all context i.e. of family, of other existing job opportunities etc. Except Glen all the other employees lived alone, were Christian (hence English speaking), three out of the five lived in slums. Is that the profile of our call centre employees? I don’t claim to be an expert but I felt there was an enormous distortion of reality. Most slum dwellers rarely complete their 10th grade, are educated in Marathi speaking schools and cannot speak in English.

Also I think the movie was incredibly harsh. Even within the call centre fraternity, people form attachments and groups. They do not exist alone (which the movie implied). They go out together, go shopping, “party” together to cope and enjoy with their new life and money. It would have been interesting to know the spaces of pleasure within this new fraternity or how the transition occured from Glen to Shanti.

He excluded the entire middle and upper middle professionals for whom the call centre is job in transition, a means to sustain them till a more stable, “productive” job was found or teenagers as young as the 10th or 12th grade students for whom it is fast money and means to assert their individualism. More often than not they want the GUCCI glares.

I did relate to the married couple, where both of them worked in different shifts and did not have time to meet each other. They spent just 15 minutes together in a day. However the setting, a Mc Donald’s (symbol of American imperialism?), with him bargaining for a free toy. They are both eating a combo and she insisted that she wants a Mirinda. The scene was overstuffed. There was so much symbolism that it I did not know what to see, their lack of intimacy or Mc Donalds' overarching presence. I know a similar situation, where a friend of mine was complaining about how her relationship felt incomplete because she did not see her husband. He came home from a night shift at 7.30 or 8.0 am and she had to leave for her morning shift at 9.0/9.30am. They would have a super fast functional quickie. She missed him, the comfort of his body and their relationship. The movie missed theses nuances or even the harsh demands of these new jobs.

It was too busy relying on symbols without fleshing them out: The new buildings in New Bombay, Hirananadani complex, Mc Donalds..........

On the whole, the movie was disappointing. Rohan described it way too well.

Desi party:home

Yesterday I coincidentally found kau6 online and was too excited. We just started talking and I mentioned to him that I often go to desi parties here.

To which he said that probably desi implied the “negative” aspects of Indians back in India. They became the other. Hmmmm….And the question was whom we called us, Indians like me who had migrated there or those whose parents were of Indian origin but they were born and brought up in America.

Later on I was talking to Mayur. I bug the guy quite a bit but he sometimes actually listens to me and we had a discussion about being desi.

When I first came here and we decided to go to a desi party, I found it ridiculous. Because i did associate the “negative” aspects of being “Indian” with the word. Indian did not sound as bad as desi.

What was desi and who was desi here?
“Conventional”, not “cosmopolitan”, provincial, not urban?
They became synonymous with …………

If your food would “smell” when you were eating Indian food in an office filled with White Americans. The smell (no aroma) implied oil, unhealthy, unhygienic. It was not hospital clean……

A Gujju diamond merchant.
Surname Patel….The Patel brothers as they are called… Patels here have a dubious entrepreneurial fame…. you’ll find them everywhere mostly in Indian grocery and food stores…and who have migrated here in hoardes…..
To those who listened to Punjabi/ bollywood music or someone who wore a sari/ salwaar kameez in the public space and had a strong regional accent.
Or with general things which got associated with uncultured immigrants…. like having dirty nails or unwhite set of teeth….

This politics of image completely dictated how your character would be judged and the same politics compelled you to throw your earlier clothes (like shedding your earlier image) and buy from here, from gap, or old navy (whose clothes are as good as the ones in khokha market, parle) or banana republic.

However this discomfort is not completely satisfied with buying. You have to watch the Nicks game, or know the Yankees, eat with chopsticks in a Thai restaurant, leave a tip of 15% of the bill, say thank you if someone holds the door for you (which is a nice gesture in any case) or be extremely conscious of someone else’s space….say sorry if your bag accidentally brushed someone or the strap of your bag touched someone….

For me......
Somewhere in this I also carried my own notion of desi. To me it represented men who would ogle at you in bombay or conventional men, the young Punjabi business boys who call a woman slut if she claimed her body her own and danced for her pleasure or to be looked at or men who are very stiff/ conscious of their bodies.

I wonder what was desi to the guys??

The Desi space......
Firstly these desi parties become a big meeting ground for long lost outoftouch friends. I bumped in to people I met straight after school i.e. 8 years! They become a space to find your own… look for familiarity…the desi space and particularly bollywood becomes home. You are connected simply by the fact you are here…. you don’t have to explain who you are or where you come from… you think you know someone because you relate say over a bollywood song .... say like ek mein aur ek tu hein or even beyonce’s count on it….

The question still remains.. whom do we call our own?

My virtual Identity

After an intense introspection of what my virtual identity should be I finally selected one that would describe what I wanted to project online, flirtatious and loud at the same time, intrigue or disgust people enough to read me and most importantly describe my flirtations with different spaces. Promiscuous spaces.

I was simultaneously chatting with Harsh and Chintan, throwing names at them. Each time my expression would change, a mischievous giggle with “dirty intellect” to a dirty frown with “contaminated cravings” (Harsh’s idea), to a silent laugh (my sister is getting her facial done behind me, she’s covered in the white L’oreal mask, trying hard to relax and enjoy the “sensual” face pack, while I know her mind is racing with the chores she has to complete today) with “promiscuous platforms” (Chintan’s brainwave).

So here I am, all excited on a Saturday afternoon with a new identity and an excitement over starting a new project!