Sunday 12th October 2008

India holds an ongoing love affair with the cellular phone. There are 289 million mobile phone connections in the country, and it’s growing at a rate of 9 million a month. Compare that to the rate of internet penetration at a measly 4% and it’s clear that no one’s being lured away too quickly. Every Indian has a mobile. Calls are cheap, and every day pop, techno and hip-hop ring tones buzz from pockets and bags. It’s perfectly acceptable to answer a phone in the middle of a meeting, and politicians have even been known to answer them live on TV. Like a sixth former with a new boyfriend, Indians will quite happily to send twenty or thirty text messages a day. Get yourself a handset in India, and you’ll soon be deluged with multiple daily ads, and cold calls, and sometimes calls that will, inexplicably, just play music in your ears. Indians send each others text messages of all kinds, about births, marriages and deaths, but nothing is more beloved than the text joke. There is a text joke of the day in our morning newspaper (today’s: Q: When does an Indian man do his exercise? A: Sucking his stomach in when the ladies walk by). Kids walk down the road selling maps to tourists with one hand and texting with the other, taxi drivers answer their phones sometimes more than once a trip (though take note: they always pull over first).

We, however, do not yet have mobile phones. Tightened national security means it is prohibitively difficult to register for one, and so for the last fortnight we have been at the mercy of our bosses to get them. This means that we are effectively social and professional pariahs. We cannot register for various services, since they don’t accept landline numbers, and we can’t make friends, since, well, friends text each other. It’s the daily gripe at the breakfast table in our house, perhaps principally because we’re having trouble getting internet too and it we’ve all forgotten the skills needed to actually talk to each other in person.

So, right now, we’re pressing our silent faces up to the windows of the networked world, and taking a peer inside.

In a sense, India has every reason to be obsessed with the phone call. A large part of their business is based on them. There are hundreds of call centers in India, employing an estimated 350,000 people. These are night workers, young people who by day are good Indian children to their parents, helping make daal and saying puja, and by night they are Americans. “Rajesh” becomes “Ricky”; “Subash” becomes “Sam”. They are given accent coaching to replace their Delhi-speak with perfect American drawl or London twang. They are infused with company values and the impression that they have a job which makes them upwardly mobile and in some way part of a larger, more sophisticated machine than if they worked for a regular Indian company. The better call centres have company incentives and group bonding days, yoga classes, relaxation rooms.

But reality bites when a phone call comes in. Any one who has ever spent a dreary shift in a call centre will know what demeaning, spirit-crushing work it really is. An American housewife will call, demanding to know why her washing machine won’t work, shouting that it is the third time she has called in 24 hours and that it must be your incompetence that is to blame. Or a British businessman will call, screaming that he can’t get online, swearing and cursing that he can’t seem to get through to anyone who is not Indian these days.

A novel chronicling the lives of these young people - Indian by day, Western by night – has sold more than a million copies across the country and has been made into a movie that is released here this month. Priced at 90 rupees (around £1) and available in supermarkets, the book has brought pop fiction to a generation that has not previously been known for it’s love affair with reading. One Night at the Call Centre by Chetan Bhaghat chronicles just that: an evening to early morning shift in an office team of six young people, who are tormented by their lack of identity, their insular nocturnal world, and their love-hate affair with the Western world. They go to clubs, drink Long Island Ice Teas one after another, throw stones through the window of Pizza Hut, and have sex in cars. Then they are flattened beneath the hierarchy of work, try to earn enough money to please their parents, struggle with arranged marriages. And it all comes to a head when, in the early hours of the morning they receive a call from God.

“Now, do you know what is the most important call in the world?”
“No,” Vroom said. Everyone else shook their heads.
“The inner call,” God said.
“The inner call?” Everyone said in unison.
“Yes, the little voice inside that wants to talk to you. But you can only hear it when you are at peace – and then too it is hard to hear it. Because in modern life the networks are too busy. The voice tells you what you really want.”

The voice of God, if it is to be heard, has to wrestle not with pop music, or with sex, with money, or with drugs. In India, the voice of God has to wrestle with Vodafone.

Still, without a mobile phone, none of us have yet found our religious epiphany. And inner call or no inner call, when we find ourselves at peace, all we really want is to send a text message.